La petite soldate

Gaëlle Bourges loves nothing more than to draw her subjects from the inexhaustible wellspring of art history. Tapestry, classical painting, parietal frescoes, her dance theater is rooted in the question of representations from yesterday to today. With La petite soldate, she takes on a short work by Stravinsky, L'Histoire du Soldat, a musical mimodrama imagined from a story by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, itself imbued with Faustian references and inspired by a Russian tale. The pitch? A penniless soldier on leave comes across an old man who convinces him to give up his violin in exchange for a magic book that can foretell the future. But the stranger is none other than the Devil, and the violin is the soldier's soul. Somewhere between object theater and disco dancefloor, this solo transposes the original plot to the feminine and gives a contemporary echo to the themes tackled (war, love, the lure of gain) without losing sight of the musical preponderance of this hybrid form.