“And it passes and it passes away”
It starts strong. Magda puts on a show, dressed in her iconic black denim shorts, a gold mirrored top and a large jacket bearing her image. She throws things at us that we don’t understand, but in the bits and pieces we receive, we tell ourselves that she’s not doing very well, that it must have been a busy day. She greets the public, summons love and, staccato words that arrive faster than her thoughts, presents us with her team, her common body: Gaspard Guilbert, “the one who makes the earth tremble, he is capable of waking the dead , he is able to make them play with us; That’s good, because we invited them all”, Bia Kaysel, “the one who makes my eyes seem to have lots of little colors, the one who makes my soul shine brightly” and Alice Martins, “the flower of flowers, the cherry on the cake, the cream of the creams, she is basically the heroine of the story”.
They have looks that shine and, from the first moments, affirm: death will not get us, the living! Light is wonderfully written. A half pink halo softens the pain. Later, there will be talk of separating the worlds, but only symbolically. The space is crossed by a border transforming the incense into a line that shines with a thousand lights. But between the ghosts, there is dance, superbly carried by Gaspard’s soundtrack, enveloping, almost cinematographic which even manages to transcend Sorrowful daughters of Jerusalem, RV 638: II. Let the Zephyrs be silentthe Vivaldi monument of beauty.
“Either you’re alive or you’re dead”
Grieving is a personal act. It can be experienced with great bursts of collective crying or alone in one’s corner. The Rose of Jericho embodies all possible postures of all possible cultures. Is crying a choreographic gesture? Oh yes. The piece conjures and consoles. But warding off evil spells or consoling grieving souls can be achieved through gestures of domination: on all fours, Alice becomes an animal in the service of her powerful mistress Magda. It can be a hug inspired by the farandoles of Pina Bausch, a solo where Alice carries all the sorrows of the world on her arched shoulders, her center of gravity pulling towards hell. This could be getting crushed by details, like a child’s car. It can be an incantation, knees and legs bent in full seconds, the face entirely covered with a pink veil. It could be a hand holding back a jaw ready to collapse.
Western queer
In its dramaturgy, The Rose of Jericho goes from chaos to peace, on a road that is by definition mountainous. The coherence between the words, the dance, the sound and the light is reinforced by the costumes, especially these jackets with golden and transparent fringes. Mourning, a western? The parallel is not completely crazy: there is a big bad guy, called injustice, lack and dismay, and a good guy called denial. And what does that look like on stage? Well, pop zombies a la Stranger Things. The completely dislocated body expresses weariness in the face of deaths, especially brutal ones, and this crazy desire to bring them back. What about denial? This takes the form of a beautiful, intense and exhausting fuck. Sex and vanities against the reaper who looks like a boxer, we take it!
