Jean-Luc Ho

Hubert Hazebroucq and Jean-Luc Ho - dancing master and music master - take you on a dance concert that lets you see and hear the finest pages of the Grand Siècle choreographic repertoire. In a committed performance that makes sense of every bar and every step, this suite of ballet entrances interweaves a whirlwind of Baroque characters and passions.
baroque characters and passions, abstraction and theatricality, fantasy and refinement, and a contemporary sensibility and imagination. This dance concert is a unique anthology
of the most virtuoso pieces in the Baroque solo repertoire.

‘Ballet imitates manners, actions and passions through figurative cadences’.
Expressing the various characters, their customary activities and their affections was the aim of dance in the time of Lully and his choreographer Beauchamps, as much as it was for their emulators. The scenes and entertainment of the tragédies-lyriques and opéra-ballets combine movement and music in a single expressive impulse, stylising passions in the same way to deliver their energy and poetry. Certain emblematic pieces, with their evocative power and exemplary expressiveness, have been ‘transcribed’ in two ways. On the one hand, for the harpsichord, the dances originally composed for the violins were rewritten, and on the other, for the dance, the choreographies associated with this music were notated using a specific system for writing steps, published by Raoul Feuillet in 1700. We thus have early choreographies of the Passacaille d'Armide, the Entrée d'Apollon and the Chaconne d'Arlequin...

This dance concert gives us the chance to see and hear the most beautiful pages of this dance repertoire, interwoven with pieces for harpsichord in the French style. The minimal staging, based on masks - de rigueur at the time for theatrical dances - highlights the movement and richness of the choreographic composition of the Baroque dancing masters, combining subtlety, variety, virtuosity and sensuality in an organic harmony with the musical writing and its gestures. Supported by a performance committed to making sense of every bar and every step, this suite of Entrées de ballet, a whirlwind of Baroque characters and passions, interweaves abstraction and theatricality, fantasy and refinement, in a way that is both sensitive and imaginative today.

Jean-Luc Ho, harpsichord
Hubert Hazebroucq, baroque dance

A school version is possible with mediation.