pitié!

Dance performance pitie! by les ballets C de la B, Alain Platel and Fabrizio Cassol, programmed in Holland Festival 2009.
Stage director Alain Platel and composer Fabrizio Cassol ‘de-westernised’ and ‘de-protestantised’ Bach’s music, arriving at a universal St. Matthew Passion. Christ is sung by a young Congolese countertenor; the two Marias, who do not appear in the original, by three women. The aria Erbarme dich is the musical nucleus of the work, reflecting, according to Platel, the passion’s essential theme: the plea for compassion, ‘pitié’. Ten dancers, in thirteen tableaux, express mankind’s condition as it struggles to observe the worthy but nearly unattainable moral principle of loving your neighbour as yourself. ‘Surrender yourself to Platel’s intuitive universe and you will see and hear a superb performance. One that will reverberate long and deliberately,’ wrote NRC Handelsblad.