Light, music and motion in perfect harmony

The 'Symphony of Lights' performed last weekend at the Royal Opera House of Musical Arts was a new commission from the Swiss company, ‘Lumen Créations’.

While their own promotional notes are full of unhelpful rhetoric, their production was a perfectly synthesised combination of contemporary dance, circus acrobatics, aerial discipline, music, light technology and vivid backdrop projection. They created a breath-taking visual opera, which transfixed the audience for a seamless seventy minutes. The only distraction was the interruption by late comers being shown to their seats for ten minutes into the hypnotic performance.
Curtains opened to reveal a projection of constellations moving across the night sky while a recording of Rachmaninov provided an evocative soundtrack.

Manuel Maes, 31, carried a huge tree-sized fan, illuminated by LED lights as two ladies came through the auditorium wearing white fan costumes, twinkling as they joined him on stage. Always slow and smooth, the choreography mirrored the atmospheric music.
A suspended Marine Pirotais intertwined herself in a silk rope to a psychedelic backdrop of clouds. Mesmerising and supple, she spun herself into impossible shapes using balletic movement in mid-air.
Accompanied by Debussy’s ‘Arabesque’ and ethereal swirls like galaxies behind, the French aerial artist, Anaïs Franco, was suspended in a metal circle; a graceful and serene, continuously flowing, ‘Lady in the Moon’. Below, Lydie Boisset 21, started to spin in her illuminated Cyr wheel, a shadow and earth-bound echo of Anaïs’ acrobatics above.

In complete contrast, four break-dancers leapt on to a vocal hip-hop track. They threw themselves down, jumping on their hands, flipping and leapfrogging against vivacious coloured clouds and concluding in a flash of spotlight to thunderous applause.
A revolving blue ice-cube projection and electronic violin and harp backing enhanced the incredible strength, control and balance demonstrated by Marine Pirotais as she slowly unfurled into sustained hand and headstands. Her movements and poses were constantly evolving into seemingly impossible contortions of the human body. It was a spectacular highlight of the show and received well-deserved and prolonged adulation.
Another stunning favourite came with duo aerial acrobats, Violette Chaleard and Bruno Blandin. Their triangle trapeze gymnastics defied gravity, changing shapes as they spun and turned to the Music of the Spheres.

As a pair, their artistic coordination was compelling. Violette was hanging on his foot – her foot, his leg - hard to know who, supported whom by what, their bodies spinning upside down and merging into a single form. Even the trapeze became flexible, pulled into different shapes in a fascinating and unbelievable conclusion.
To the memorable piano score of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, Anaïs Franco returned in a Trio of silk drape artistry. Three women ascended the fabric in perfect synchronisation, flowing and weaving. They twisted and turned in choreographed backflips and summersaults, while green flowing ribbon projections reflected their agility. Making a final ascent to the top, they fell in a unison tumble, eliciting gasps from the onlookers.

The project introduced Utka Gavuzzo juggling pink balls, blue skittles and luminous swirls that became flowers, circles and patterns to techno-rock or rhythmic drumming.
Video and projection designer, Julian Schaferlee, created Spirograph patterns, which changed into a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes in a ceaseless feast of visual poetry. Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ lured Lydie Boisset to tease her Cyr wheel while the beat-boys complemented her movement in an anachronistic juxtaposition of time and space.
Lumen Créations, under its founder and director Nicolas Hesslein, tell their stories by, ‘merging live performance and digital installation’. Following two sold out performances in Muscat, there is surely scope for a return visit very soon.

Photo credit by Khalid Al Busaidi