PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

As part of NYU’s response to COVID-19, gatherings will not be taking place on campus, including events at NYU Skirball. Ticket holders to canceled or postponed events will be contacted by the box office.

 

Adapted from Mozart’s final composition, long-time collaborators Alain Platel and Fabrizio Casso deliver a bold new interpretation of Mozart’s Requiem that combines opera, jazz, and popular African music, in an elegy to death that is at once joyful and sad, redemptive and uplifting.

Fourteen musicians and singers from South Africa, the Congo and Europe accompany a video that captures L.’s passage through the final hours of her life. Accordion, electric guitar and bass, euphonium, percussion, and singers equally comfortable in popular and classical idioms, inhabit a set that alludes to memorials and burial grounds, but plays host to exhilarating song and dance. Masterfully combining forms and traditions, Requiem pour L. invites the audience to witness a new kind of mass, one that offers unforgettable and poignant moments of mourning supported by an exaltation of voices; an extravagant celebration at the moment of death, but a performance for the living.

les ballets C de la B (Ghent, Belgium) was founded by Alain Platel in 1984. Since then it has become a company that enjoys great success at home and abroad. Over the years it has developed into an artistic platform for a variety of choreographers. The company still keeps to its principle of enabling artists from various disciplines and backgrounds to take part in this dynamic creative process. As a result of its “unique mixture of artistic visions,” les ballets C de la B is not easy to classify. It is nevertheless possible to discern something like a house style (popular, anarchic, eclectic, committed), and its motto is “this dance is for the world and the world is for everyone.” lesballetscdela.be

Advisory: Requiem Pour L is suitable for ages 16+.

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NYU Skirball’s educational and enrichment programming is made possible in part with generous support from Con Edison.

Support for Skirball Moves programming is provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Harkness Foundation for Dance.

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Made possible in part with support from the General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA . #MadeinFlanders

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Spring20-1 Ballets C de la B 34_requiem-pour-L-_-chris-van-der-burght-(2)
Photo: Chris Van der Burght
Spring20-2 Ballets C de la B 34_requiem-pour-L-_-chris-van-der-burght-(6)
Photo: Chris Van der Burght
Spring20-4 Ballets C de la B 34_requiem-pour-L-_-chris-van-der-burght-(14)
Photo: Chris Van der Burght
Spring20-5 Ballets C de la B 34_requiem-pour-L-_-chris-van-der-burght-(26)
Photo: Chris Van der Burght
Spring20-6 Ballets C de la B 34_requiem-pour-L-_-chris-van-der-burght-(28)
Photo: Chris Van der Burght

Go Beyond

Andy Teirstein on Les Ballets C de la B

There is an alchemy to the art of cultural mixture. Musicians have always reached across borders, inspired by the infusion

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

Get ready for the NYU Skirball Book Club: Friday, May 1 @ 6:30PM.