© Pino Pipitone
Concept : Frédéric FLAMAND/ Zaha HADID
Chorreography : Frédéric FLAMAND
Scenography : Zaha HADIDCréation dans le cadre du Festival de Marseille
les 4 et 5 juillet 2006Production Metapolis II (2006) : Ballet National de Marseille
Production à la création en 2000 : Charleroi / Danses – Centre Chorégraphique de la Communauté Française de Belgique
Coproduction à la création en 2000 : Bruxelles-Brussel 2000Capitale européenne de la Culture (B), La maison des Arts de Créteil F), l’Arsenal de Metz (F), Het Muziektheater amsterdam (NL), Festival Oriente Occidente di Rovereto (I).
In 2000 and in collaboration with the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, Frédéric Flamand created Metapolis, the first of a series of reflections on the contemporary city. Since then Frédéric Flamand has been appointed General Director of the Ballet National de Marseille and Zaha Hadid has won the pritzker Prize, the highest accolade in architecture . When Frédéric Flamnd learnt in 2005 that Zaha hadid had won the commission to design an office tower in Marseilles for shipping company CMA-CGM , this was one coincidence too many for him to ignore any temptation to breathe new life into the production that had brought them together in the first place.
Frédéric Flamand might have been happy simply reprising the project from 2000 and teaching it to the dancers at the ballet, as usually happens with repertoire pieces. However when he talks about recreation he means it in the strict sens of the word. His approach to dance actually favours the dancer’s personality when it comes to executing a particular movement. The way he practises this performing art is that the places the performer at the very heart of his creation. If he recreates a dance with a new dancers, it is the dance and the choreography that will be adapted to the dancers, not the other way round.
For his recreation of Metapolis, Frédéric Flamand will be working with more performers than in his original version. The city has grown in the meantime, revealing more intense flows of traffic. Flamand will be taking into account the solid classical technique that many of the dancers at the Ballet National de Marseille have at their disposal and will be working on hybridising it with the contemporary style that defined the piece originally. The set design will be identifical to that of 2000, but his approach with the new dancers will enable new interactions to be developed with it. Seeing the new version of Metapolis (assuming we saw the original dance) is like visiting a familiar city, but one where all its residents have changed : citizens as the main drivers behind the transformation of cities.
With the recreation, Metapolis II forms the third part in a trilogy which originally began with the first version of Metapolis, and then continued with silent Collisions, created in collaboration with the architect Thom Mayne, and La Cité Radieuse co-created with Dominique Perrault.