The choreographer presents Cry of the Heart, blending dance, theatre, and cinema in a labyrinth of emotion
A hold. So gentle, so melting, that one struggles to tear through the membrane that envelops us, and to applaud. This strange and rare effect bears a title that suits it well — Cry of the Heart — and a name: Norwegian choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen.
His breath runs through the entire two-and-a-half-hour performance, danced by thirty-three members of the Paris Opera Ballet, on stage until Thursday, October 13, at the Palais Garnier in Paris.
If a few spectators gave up at the interval on Wednesday, September 21, those who stayed celebrated the premiere — and its dream cast: Héléna Pikon, historic figure of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (1940–2009), and Marion Barbeau, première danseuse of the Opera and star of Cédric Klapisch’s film En corps.
For his first commission from the institution, Øyen, 44, who began rehearsing with the dancers before the pandemic in 2020, asserts a wide-ranging artistic gesture. He weaves dance, theatre, and scenography into a succession of fluid planes that nest inside one another, filling the immense stage. This cinematographic impulse — one of the inspirations the artist often mentions — is reinforced by the projection of black-and-white film, both pre-recorded and live, elegant and never redundant.
Is it also his delicate sense of atmosphere? His lyrical musical choices between piano and violin? There is a kind of spell, already noticed in his works since 2016, that operates and never lets go. In contrast to many massive and efficient spectacles, Cry of the Heart slips into a labyrinth, patiently finding its path toward emotion.
Øyen’s work is rooted in the confidences of the performers, who, during rehearsals, shared fragments of their personal stories.
These have been remixed into fiction by the choreographer, who wrote the piece’s text with dramaturg Andrew Wale.
The themes of Cry of the Heart, centred around Marion Barbeau — superb — circle again and again around illness, abandonment, solitude, the uneasy relationship with one’s parents, love that no longer loves every day… and death as the final resolution.
We know the tune, but Øyen serves it in an elegant, crystalline key.
A Suggestive Writing
The narrative is full of holes, erratic, like a stream of consciousness constantly jostled by sudden associations of ideas.
The name of Pina Bausch is pulled out of the hat to underline a proximity — notably because Øyen created Bon Voyage, Bob with the German troupe in 2018.
But the Norwegian artist, who made his first solo in 2004 and founded his company winter guests two years later, stands apart with a manner entirely his own: far wilder and more surreal, and more melancholic as well, in laying bare guts and states of soul. Even if it is too long, too sentimental, too much of a psy-show brushing against Oedipus… the beauty and obsessions of Cry of the Heart — its sometimes kitsch aesthetic — mark the universe of a true author.
The ellipses of this collective drama are filled by the décor, which overlaps like points of suspension. Panels and painted landscapes on wheels, manipulated by stagehands, glide over velvet. They open and close a bedroom, a kitchen, a dining room, like cocoons.
If Alan Lucien Øyen seems to invent nothing in terms of stagecraft, he sublimates its mechanisms with the complicity of Alexander Băles. Even though we are in the theatre and can also see the reverse side of the set, every space feels intimate. No hard angles — except psychological ones — within these bubbles of life that meet, merge, and dissolve to make room for the next.
The dance binds and gathers like a long ribbon.
In collaboration with the performers and associate choreographer Daniel Proietto, Øyen releases passing crowds who at times stop and sit.
Here and there, he sparks quick flashes of movement — small groups passing the flame from one to another.
The writing, supple and suggestive, is connected — without illustrating — to the performers’ text, which bursts forth and speaks in the same gesture. A feat they face as if effortlessly, revealing themselves remarkably gifted in this double exercise that becomes one.
At the forefront of Cry of the Heart, one must mention among others Laurène Levy, Juliette Hilaire, Alexandre Boccara, Simon Le Borgne, Antonin Monié, and Takeru Coste.
Theatre as “Religion”
This spectacle, paradoxically both dense and fragile, spreads across the stage’s every corner, even extending deep into the dazzling Foyer de la danse, whose chandeliers suddenly blaze.
Alignments of frames, shimmering reflections, reversals of illusion between truth’s artifice and the false more real than real — Øyen, a fervent devotee of the black box, puts theatre into perspective through its depth of field.
He makes its magical, dreamlike string vibrate.
At times, the dancers find themselves spectators of a story of which they are part and which nonetheless escapes them. Nothing surprising when one knows that Øyen spent his childhood and adolescence sitting in a theatre, reading comic books while his father — a costume designer at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, Norway, founded by Henrik Ibsen — worked on stage.
Fabrication, rehearsals, dreams and lies formed the daily screen of his imagination. For him, who began dance training late, at age seventeen, theatre is “a religion, a formation,” but also — and above all — a place where he felt “safe.”
He recalls this here with the conviction of someone who truly believes in the illusion of theatre and its cathartic virtues.
This cosmic vessel carrying reality at the speed of imagination that is Cry of the Heart is piloted above all by two women. Specially invited by the choreographer, Héléna Pikon, a central figure in Pina Bausch’s company since the 1980s, offers here a renewed version of herself.
A commanding maternal figure, she wrings out her talent as both dancer and actress into a precise, concentrated essence.
Once a young girl who loved to sing and coo every morning upon waking, she even ventures a melody in Norwegian.
At her side, Marion Barbeau, chosen by Øyen even before she rose to fame with Klapisch, shines. She adds a sumptuous chapter to her artistic journey.
Urgent in movement as in speech, she helps make this Cry of the Heart an emotional blaze.