Press
Imagine a museum at night (…) you wander through the galleries immersed in darkness (…). Trapped in their frames for centuries, bishops, princesses, heroes and heroines, mothers with children and even Adam and Eve seem determined to free themselves from their eternal immobility (…). Is it the memory of their past or the desire to discover the real world that sets them in motion? Who knows. But once they have tasted this newfound freedom, they want to go further: to leave the frame and set out to discover the world.
Jean-Marie Wynants, Le Soir / December 2024
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Judith, Salome, Adam and Eve, Venus, portraits of young women and other famous paintings are literally cut into fragments and brought to light within an original stage device composed of openings. Windows or doors cut into a black canvas, shaped with bevelled edges, focus the viewer’s gaze on a detail: a revealed throat, a worried face, hands reading a Bible.
The perfection of the costumes, hairstyles and make-up reinforces the optical illusion and immediately immerses us in the Renaissance world of the portrait painter and his models. It is therefore no surprise that the work toured for 25 years after its creation, as it allows audiences to immerse themselves in a baroque, abundant, ambiguous and intense pictorial universe.
Delphine Goater, ResMusica / February 2025
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Three decades after [Les dernières hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien], it is therefore a new generation of performers that takes hold of the painter’s universe. Performers who embody with great precision every tremor that runs through these sequences of living images. All sensations are conveyed through their bodies, in a performance of great technical mastery and extraordinary poetry. (…)
In these tableaux, it is not only bodies that are represented: every fragment of skin becomes a sign carrying meaning. The image has a rhythm, a thought, a momentum. If the painter created it and theatre gave it movement, it retains its autonomy and becomes alive. From one tableau to the next, the spectator travels through different intensities. Within each frame, the action is precise and absorbing. The figures begin to move in a hypnotic dance that will touch each spectator in a unique way.
Louis Thiébaut, RTBF.be / December 2024
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Les nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien preserves this atmosphere dominated by humour, eroticism and the mystery of the characters’ presence. (…) The work, remarkable for its aesthetics, plays with contrasts between light and darkness, axes and angles of vision, with a life sensed beyond the frame, through the attitudes and postures of the characters. (…) The dancers – Dorian Chavez, Colline Libon, Lenka Luptáková, Frauke Mariën and Eléonore Valère-Lachky – shine through the precision and intensity of their performances.
Didier Béclard, Le Suricate / December 2024
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With its small theatre of illusions, Les Nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien restores the full mystery of images, in that twilight moment when certainties waver and nothing seems assured. In 1988, while touring in London, Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté discovered the portrait of a young princess at the National Gallery. Troubled by the ambiguity of the figure emerging from this painting by Cranach, they transformed it into a performance. Today, this version, rewritten and rearranged 30 years later, has lost none of its power and retains all its mystery and dreamlike beauty.
Filip Forestier, À voir et à danser / February 2025
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(…) Every work by Mossoux-Bonté functions as a “vision machine”, to refer to Paul Virilio, but one that is trapped. It remains a clear and obscure, singular and poisonous object that introduces the gaze to an abyss, all the more unsettling because it reveals itself only slowly. These Nouvelles Hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien (1990; 1991; 2000 and today – the four versions are comparable in this respect) constitute an almost foundational principle of the work of these two choreographers.
Philippe Verrièle, Danser canal historique / February 2025
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It is not certain that all of Cranach the Elder’s contemporaries perceived the humorous and erotic aspects of his painting, as he was a friend of Luther. He concealed his game well, and this performance reveals it to us. As fascinating as it is entertaining, Les Nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien evokes the surreal atmospheres of Paul Delvaux or René Magritte. Let us hope that this new version will enjoy the same success as the previous one. A great achievement that encourages audiences to discover other works by the Belgian duo Mossoux-Bonté.
Mireille Davidovici, Arts-chipels / February 2025