Le Petit Chaperon rouge | Georges Aperghis

In three short quarters of an hour, Perrault's tale is dislocated and redeployed by the great Georges Aperghis with the fluidity and unpredictable clarity of a waking dream. In the land of dreams, anything and everything, or almost anything, can burst onto the stage at any moment: masks, zany props, various provisions appear at will among the instruments visible on stage to support the action or to set it off on unexpected tracks. Even identities can be exchanged like costumes. We already know that a wolf can pretend to be a little girl, so after all, why not the other way around? Two childish pleasures merge in this musical theatre piece for young and old alike: that of storytelling and that of play. The storytelling pleasure is based on the complicity between the narrator and the audience, who never tire of going over the familiar landscape of an old story again; the game pleasure is based on the freedom to create rules and characters to discover other worlds. Add to this the pleasure of Aperghis' music: immediately contemporary, it seems to be quite naturally so. Sometimes it is born of situations, sometimes it produces them, but without ever ceasing to follow its own path and speak its own language. Punctuating our memories, accompanying and reviving the flow of metamorphoses, it weaves a fabulous counterpoint with words and bodies.