The stage at the Opéra Garnier is empty. It is painted entirely in white (floor and walls) and looks like a dance studio. On the floor, a drawing represents a series of interlocking circles. On the sides, transparent panels are suspended, acting as backstage areas or ‘windows’ that divide the spaces. The staging of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, composed in 1790, has been entrusted to Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a leading figure in contemporary dance whose language has been marked for almost forty years by energy, elegance, purity and repetition.

First performed in 2017 and currently being revived at the Garnier, Anne Teresa De Keersmacker has taken Mozart’s opera and stripped it of all the frills of its century. Radicality and minimalism dominate here; the project is daring and its success exceptional.

The staging is completely devoid of scenery (something that often disturbs the eye in opera). With only lighting effects designed by Jan Versweyveld, the fullness of the voices and bodies occupying the space can be heard and seen through the subtle movements magnificently performed by both the singers and the dancers, who make Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography a precise and sharp art. The dialogue between the dancers is linked and unlinked over the course of the three-hour performance, through duets and collective moments. In this respect, the performances of the two Despinas (Hera Hyesang Park as the singer and Marie Goudot as the dancer) and the two Dorabellas (Angela Browner as the singer and Samantha van Wissen as the dancer) are exceptional moments in this orchestration of voice and gesture.

If the first scenes of the production are a little cold, it’s because the director has realised that the four fiancés who are promised eternal love in the plot devised by librettist Lorenzo da Ponte are, by habit, only interested in convention. However, as soon as the action starts, as soon as Ferrando and Guglielmo go off to war and assume another guise to seduce the two heroines Fiordigili and Dorabella, everything becomes magical. The stage comes alive, bodies move, voices crackle, clothes take on new colours. So each scene blends sounds and movements in an unknown syntax to bewitch the spectator who expects repertory opera, as the great directors understood, to renew the eye, the ear and also the expression.

Così fan tutte, Palais Garnier until 9th of July 2024