Letter from Cannes - Cannes International Dance Festival in Cannes, France

Dance Magazine, March, 1998 by Roslyn Sulcas

CANNES -- For many good reasons -- the picturesque factor, fabulous weather, delicious food -- almost all of France's major arts festivals take place in beautiful, historically resonant small towns in the south of the country during the indolent summer months. While the Cannes international Dance Festival conforms geographically to the rule, it differs on most other counts: Cannes is small but very urban, its famous beachfront densely packed with high-rise apartment buildings, its populace elderly, and its cultural affiliations nearly limited to the famous film festival that is apparently the most exhaustively covered media event on the planet.

Nearly, but not quite. Since 1986, Cannes has hosted -- along with other cultural initiatives from the mairie, or town hall -- a winter dance festival that has slowly transformed itself from merely featuring a series of well-known ballet companies to one of the most interesting events on the festival circuit. The transformation is due to the curatorial skills of Yorgos Loukos, whose day job is artistic director of Lyons National Opera Ballet, and who took over as festival director in 1992 from founders Rosella Hightower and Jean-Luc Barsotti. The Greek-born Loukos, a solidly built, open-faced man who speaks an improbable number of languages fluently and exudes enthusiasm and discernment in equal parts, has taken an unconventional approach to the famously conservative inclinations of the region's population (Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right party garnered 33 percent of the region's vote in the last elections): He programs as if the public were seasoned dance lovers of catholic tastes, who might like to see a pared-down version of Romeo and Juliet by Monte Carlo Ballet one night and an avant-garde dance-theater work by David Grenke the next.

It's an approach that seems to have worked -- audiences and box-office receipts have increased annually -- and Loukos pays due homage to the Cannes cultural policies that have allowed him to shape the festival as a broadening of artistic horizons for both the public and the participating performers. He nonetheless found his budget reduced by about a third for this eleventh edition (even France, the last bastion of liberal funding for the arts, is showing evidence of reduced circumstances). Loukos's solution was a two-pronged approach featuring, on the one hand, interesting European ballet companies in largely contemporary programs and, on the other, youngish choreographers in small-scale new works.

The eight-day program started gently with the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, choreographed by Monte Carlo Ballet director Jean-Christophe Maillot, whose new Recto Verso and Vers un Pays Sage were to be seen the following afternoon (together with a strong rendition of Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto) on a mixed bill. Maillot's blend of classical technique and more contemporary inflections doesn't always work (he seems led astray by the dreaded and more or less untransatable French concept of scenographie, or staging), but it demonstrated a spirit of experiment that set the scene for much that was to come from the ballet companies, and showed off the company's fine dancers (who could be seen for the rest of the week in the audience, taking maximum advantage of so much new dance so close to home).

Later that night came a mixed program from French choreographer Herve Robbe and American Wally Cardona (who recently made a piece for Robbe's company, Le Marietta Secret), both showing premieres of works in progress, and both looking tentative. Inducting us slowly into festival rhythms (and allowing decent sleep-in time before press conferences, much needed after late-night, discussion-filled, festival-hosted dinners), the next two days featured just one company each evening -- Charleroi Danses, headed by Belgian choreographer Frederic Flamand, and Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre. Both were spectacular but very differently styled theatrical events -- Flamand's Moving Target an imaginative but messy mixed-media event, and Tankard's Furioso a brilliant, breathtaking depiction of male-female relationships that creates a shifting visual poetry and constant kinetic excitement through the skillful use of harnesses and dancers' physical prowess.

The succeeding days saw wonderfully clear, blue-skied afternoons (made particularly gratifying by reports of rain and cold from New York), press debates about the state of the art in the U.S. and France, and a discussion with dance patron Nathan Clark, who was visiting the festival with a view to setting up a collaborative structure with the American Dance Festival and who, in his nineties, was an indefatigably dapper presence at every performance and event. There were also programs of new works by former Lyons National Opera Ballet dancer Stanislaw Wisniewski, Lyons Opera and Monte Carlo Ballet dancers, French choreographers Gilles Baron and Lionel Hoche, Finn Tero Saarinen, and American David Grenke. My favorites were both spare male trios, by Hoche and Saarinen -- the former a well-established artist, the latter just starting out but showing evidence of a truly original dance vocabulary made up of loping moonwalking steps and limb-swirling turns, infused with an intensely focused and controlled energy.