Review: Benjamin Millepied’s Du bout des lèvres at the Spoleto Festival

Du bout des lèvres: The Fragile Eloquence of Barbara’s Chanson in Dance

Jacques Prévert’s poems seem to share the same essence as the chansons of French singer-songwriter Barbara, an icon of 1950s and 1960s France, a leading voice of the cabaret scene of Paris’s Latin Quarter and of French music hall. They speak of melancholic refrains, childhood memories, roses, pale mornings. But also of regrets, farewells, whispers and dreams. Above all, they speak of love, which for the artist was a true religion.

It is Barbara’s deep voice that opens Benjamin Millepied’s Du bout des lèvres, presented as an Italian national premiere at the 69th edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto by its new artistic director Daniele Cipriani. To live, one must burn with passion, even reach the point of suffering. This statement encapsulates Barbara’s poetic universe and becomes the key through which Millepied invites us to enter his creation.

Barbara knew absolute love intimately – the love she would transform into the very substance of her art. Her personal and artistic relationships, from Jacques Brel to Georges Moustaki, nourished an imagination shaped by passion, absence and memory. With Brel, she shared the years of the cabaret, later dedicating a tribute album to him; with Moustaki, she created one of the most celebrated duets in the history of the chanson, La dame brune. And it is precisely Jacques Prévert’s poetic universe that seems to resonate throughout the layers of this production. Still known as Monique Serf, before adopting the stage name that would make her famous, Barbara attended the cabaret La Fontaine des Quatre Saisons, where she immersed herself in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of post-war Paris. Almost as if confirming this ideal affinity, only a few years earlier Prévert had published his celebrated poem Barbara, destined to become one of the emblematic works of wartime memory.

The performance opens with À Göttingen, a chanson that is not far removed from this poetic universe. After all, Barbara herself had been a Jewish child forced to flee during the Nazi occupation. Yet, always dressed in black and often considered austere and formal, the celebrated Dame en Noir possessed an unexpected luminosity: in her vibrant voice, veiled with poetic sadness and a slight rasp in its lyrical mezzo-soprano range, and in the dark eyes that shone beneath her short hair.

This luminosity takes shape in the white veils by Margaux Maeght that frame the stage, brought to life by Lucy Carter’s evocative lighting design. The performers enter and disappear through them: the women, wrapped in light tunics in neutral, autumnal tones; the men, wearing knee-length trousers and sleeveless undershirts by Gauchere. The impression is of figures suspended between memory and dream, as if remembrance were slowly taking physical form within the theatrical space.

The rhythm is that of the waltz. The chansons seek embodiment through movement – the dance is viscerally expressive, yet, at the same time, concert-like. The bodies seem to breathe together with the music, allowing each melodic phrase to find its reflection in gesture. From the very beginning, one perceives that for Millepied, movement is not a mere translation of the score, but its natural continuation.

It is therefore unsurprising that Benjamin Millepied chooses to move through this universe of the chanson. Trained artistically in New York, Principal Dancer of the New York City Ballet, and deeply influenced by George Balanchine’s legacy, the French choreographer was director of the Paris Opera Ballet from 2014 to 2016. After the experience of the L.A. Dance Project, founded in 2012, he now continues his artistic journey with the Paris Dance Project, created with the aim of bringing dance to the outskirts of the French capital and fostering an ongoing dialogue with other art forms. This same vocation lies at the heart of Du bout des lèvres, which premiered at the Opéra de Montpellier last April and has now arrived in Spoleto.

If in recent years we had come to appreciate Millepied above all for the musical sensitivity with which he engaged with Philip Glass’s minimalism, here the choreographer appears to be entering a more intimate, theatrical and poetic phase. His unmistakable artistic signature remains: a language suspended between neoclassical and contemporary forms, a dance of fluid movements, firmly rooted in academic technique, yet naturally evolving within contemporary expression. This time, however, the focus is not the geometric rigour of composition. The chansons breathe through movement.

From the very first gliding steps across the floor, the body seems to merge with the movement of fingers sliding across a piano keyboard. The dance opens collectively, yet from the earliest moments the duet emerges as the natural dimension of the choreographic writing. Bodies are drawn towards one another, surrendering to mutual trust, unafraid to launch into moments of suspension or to lose their balance. Partners catch one another again, creating a game that is at times challenging, at times tender. They become the many voices of love, expressed both through the relationship between genders and through homoerotic affinity.

The solos are moments of suspension, inner reflection, vibrations responding to the call of nature, to the aesthetics of rain and memory, to the lyrical melancholy that runs through the entire production. Each performer seems to inhabit their own space like a memory slowly resurfacing, allowing gesture, more than narrative, to evoke what has been.

Among the most intense moments of the creation is the chanson that gives the work its title. Hands brush against one another, eyes search for one another, steps gradually become more insistent. Daisy Jacobson’s body inclines in ever-changing directions, while Giacomo Luci’s body rotates around itself with disarming naturalness. The lifts follow one another, sudden and weightless, almost devoid of gravity. Everything contributes to creating an atmosphere that is gentle, dreamlike and refined. They move away only to find each other again. They brush against one another, savour each other’s presence, until they vibrate once more in unison.

The celebration of the wedding procession is also present, together with the festive momentum of La marche nuptiale, accompanied by the cry of “Vive la mariée”. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the veil of melancholy reveals its true nature. The joy of the celebration slowly gives way to absence, to the expectation of a meeting capable of changing the course of a life and, for this very reason, destined to remain unfinished.

The dance becomes increasingly rarefied. The bodies seem to hold back what words can no longer express. What remains is a final journey, the inevitable rain, the memory of a lost love and that feeling of chagrin which runs like an invisible thread through Barbara’s entire poetic universe.

Millepied does not construct a narrative, but an emotional landscape. Thus, Du bout des lèvres reveals itself as a work of rare elegance, capable of translating the poetry of the chanson into the fragile eloquence of the body. And, like Barbara’s chansons, it continues to resonate even when silence has taken the place of music.

Du bout des lèvres

Choreography Benjamin Millepied
Songs Barbara

‍A Paris Danse production
Solenne du Haÿs Mascré and Benjamin Millepied
Lighting Design Lucy Carter
Set Design Margaux Maeght
Costume Design GAUCHERE

Dancers
David Adrian Freeland, Daphne Fernberger, Tom Guilbaud, Daisy Jacobson, Giacomo Luci, Emma Spinosi, Izabela Szylinska, Jacopo Giarda