words yvonne teh

Surely JS Bach couldn't have imagined the dances that would come out of his music?

“Let My Joy remain in you and your joy be full! This is My Commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you!” (John 15:12-13). Since the first four words of that Bible passage make up the title of the Fetes Galantes Company’s dance show in Hong Kong on June 6, one of the key questions of a bc interview with the company’s founder Beatrice Massin was whether Let My Joy Remain has a religious, and specifically Christian, theme.

In her answer, the Baroque dance specialist – who is also the production’s choreographer – let it be known that Let My Joy Remain is based on the music of the great Baroque composer Johan Sebastian Bach; one of whose works, a religious motet entitled Jesu, meine Freude (Jesus, my Joy), has long been a personal favourite of Massin’s. (She vividly recalls that it had a revelatory impact on her when she first heard it played at the age of 6.)

And it was in a book about Bach’s music by French author Christina Bobin that the lover of the Baroque arts – be
they dance, painting, architecture or music – came across the words “My joy remains even if Jesus is not the reason for this expression, my joy remains when the doors and faces close.”

“Whilst reading this sentence, I knew that the title of this choreography would be Let My Joy Remain,” says Massin. This is because what she has conceived “is not a performance based on religious faith, but on the joy which is provided by all physical sensations. The joy can be from within and private as well as explicit and external.”
Almost needless to say, the joy can also come out of, and be expressed in, dance itself; even the formal and disciplined French Baroque dance which had its origins in the court of the Sun King. “The austerity of dance at the court of Louis XIV was a reality”, Massin acknowledges, before moving on to point out that to make too much of this “however, ...conceal[s] the notion of pleasure and the game which will always be present. We keep the image of Louis XIV dancing Apollo or other gods and we forget that the king could also play a dragonfly, for instance. The fantasy is an essential element of the dance.” And fantasy, as we know, often begets pleasure and joy.

For several decades now, dance has been, as Massin puts it, “my domain”. Before she met Francine Lancelot – the dancer, choreographer, dance historian and pioneer in the revival of French Baroque dance – and joined her fellow Frenchwoman’s Ris et Danceries company in 1983, Massin had been part of many contemporary dance companies. And since 1993, she has made a greater name for herself not only with the establishment of her own Baroque dance company but also as a Baroque dance expert in her own right.

Yet before she even put on her first pair of dancing shoes, Massin divulges, she was the daughter of a musicologist and thus grew up with music. Though ironically, “My parents do not understand much of dance,” she admits that they played a part in ensuring that Baroque music – for her, “always the music of movement” – would be her constant companion.

So, ardent in expressing her great love for music ­– “Music is essential in my life,” she says – she links it inextricably to her love of dance. “I became a dancer in order to seize the music my own way.” And Massin has worked hard to make her body a musical instrument and her choreographies extensions of music.

Over the course of her research on what she likes to call belle dance (beautiful dance), Massin also has immersed herself in a system of Baroque dance notation known as Beauchamp-Feuillet, after its 1680’s deviser Pierre Beauchamp and Raoul Auger Feuillet who published it in 1700. Through the notation, she sees dance become “visual music” and is able to understand all the more what people of the Baroque era meant by the “wedding between music and dance”.

Although some might find it hard to imagine dancing to the music of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, say, or assorted Baroque symphonies, Massin has no such problems. Moreover, for her, “There is no difference between religious music and profane music. Both are based on the grand diversity of colours of the dances. Why not dance to Handel’s Messiah? I have already choreographed the Magnificat pour trois voix d'hommes (a canticle in praise of the Virgin Mary) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier”!

For that matter, Massin points out, “Let My Joy Remain starts with a duo which is an extract of a cantata by Bach.” In fact, she says it was the vitality and strong energy of Bach’s music which provided the starting point and gave birth to the joyous production soon to play out in Hong Kong.

The Fetes Galantes Company will perform Let My Joy Remain at the Kwai Tsing Theatre’s Auditorium on Friday, June 6. Showtime is 8pm and tickets are priced at $300, $220 and $150 from URBTIX, 2734 9009. In addition, Beatrice Massin will give a talk after the screening of The King is Dancing, the Gerard Corbiau costume drama for which she was the dance choreographer and which will be screened at 7:30pm on Tuesday, June 3, at the HK Arts Centre’s Agnes b. CINEMA! Tickets are $50 and once more from URBTIX, 2734 9009.