Ma mère l´Oye

This, originally, was a commission from Rouen Opera. The figure obligatory, the field of action designated ; to translate into images the world of Charles Perrault’s folk-tales of Mother Goose (Ma Mère l’Oye). For Thierry De Mey, the experience led to the unsuspected discovery of Maurice Ravel’s world. A superb artisan of tone-colour, a so-called impressionist yet unfailingly rigourous goldsmith. To work in his wake, to wear down the paths taken by him, became a sensorial and perhaps also a spiritual experience. It was taking the measure of the absolute luxuriance of the composer’s world. To start off with, a film score for orchestra, broad and porous, unfolding at times like a diptych, now like a video triptych. A fairy-tale cinematographic work in a dream world, Ma Mère l’Oye involves some sixty dancers and choreographers in the phantasmagorical world of the forests of Brussels and Salzburg. All portray in sensitive and unexpected manner a mythological creature or fairy-tale character, a personal reincarnation by which the ineffable individual more readily presents itself to the camera.