This intriguing collaboration brings together the a capella singers of Les Arts Florissants and a troupe that specialises in hip-hop and African urban dance. The project revolves around a series of sacred madrigals, Tenebrae Responsories, published by Carlo Gesualdo in 1611. These are a series of polyphonic settings of short texts that comment in the most anguished terms on the arrest and Passion of Christ, intended originally to resonate alongside chanted readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, as candles are gradually extinguished and we go back to black.
The moods are mostly very dark indeed, focused on death, guilt, pain and repentance for sin, all etched into the music in the form of an extreme chromaticism, with dissonances and suspensions continually clotting and clogging the harmony, whether the pace is elegiac and plangent or hectic and angry. It is not a comfortable or comforting experience, and that perhaps explains why quite a few people left the Barbican Hall in mid-performance.
This is one of those cases where you can’t avoid reading the life into the work. The one thing everyone knows about this composer is that he dispatched his first wife and her lover in an honour killing for which he received no formal punishment thanks to his high aristocratic status. He then spent much of the rest of his life in self-harming contrition. On some level this music must speak to and emanate from that disturbed and disturbing state of mind.
For this reason it was particularly appealing to encounter a performance with choreography which might permit us to look at the music freshly through a different matrix of interpretation. This has, after all, been done to memorable effect in productions of Messiah and the Bach Passions. On the face of it the mingling of six-part choir and four dancers in finding an expressive language in the body for the suffering in the music could take us away from the man himself to the heart of the matter.
Unfortunately the execution of this objective was partial and imperfect with rather too little dance and too many static tableaus.
The singers were exemplary. They maintained vocal poise, precision and blending despite having to adopt the most unlikely and awkward of physical poses. They fully entered into the sequences of stylised movement and at times were interchangeable with the dancers. The colours and word painting they brought to the sections set in the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha dramatised the betrayal of Judas and the agony and despair of the Crucifixion itself with rare power.
Also outstanding was Damiano Bigi portraying Christ himself, looking as though he had stepped out of a canvas by Caravaggio, all taut sinews, trimmed beard and skimpy drapery. His dancing was continuously expressive in line with the dramatic ebb and flow of the music, providing its compelling correlate and conduit.
However, the contribution of the other dancers was only intermittently successful. Sequences of alternating beseeching and collapsing, and a shadow play behind a curtain were apt and inventive, but at other points the mood and tempo of the dance seemed at variance with the music, especially so in the setting of the Miserere (a relief for once not to hear the Allegri!) where the busy rhythms were an actual distraction.
Black cassocks with red piping provide a vaguely sinister ecclesiastical vibe and a highly sophisticated lighting design from Xavier Lazarini reinforced the sense of being inside a Mannerist painting, with deeply shadowed recesses, and shifting spots of brilliant colour from a series of fluorescent posts.
Ultimately this was one of those evenings where the ingredients that went into the mix had rather more savour than what emerged from the synthesis. Hopefully, this will not deter similar future collaborations, because the potential for synergy between music of this period and contemporary choreography is very real.
Les Arts Florissants &Â Dancers of Amala Dianor
Carlo Gesualdo: Tenebrae Responsories
16 October 2025
75 mins, no interval
Photo Credit: Vincent Pontet