This weekend in the ’92 Theater, the French Baroque period will come alive in this year’s faculty dance performance, Molière’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The theatrical piece stretches across centuries, leaving one foot in traditional Baroque movement and the other in the ingenious modern choreography of Artist-in-Residence Patricia Beaman.
“The Bourgeois Gentleman” follows the life of an individual man, Monsieur Jordain, played by Stewart Miller ’05, who attempts to climb his way up eighteenth century France’s rigid social ladder. Beaman’s choreography strives to mock the social atmosphere of this time period, satirizing both the rising middle class and the nobility in the French Baroque period.
Nell Bridger ’06 expressed her excitement about dancing in a faculty-directed production. “I’ve loved working with Patricia because she’s just so wonderful… It’s felt a lot less last-minute than most student shows I’ve been in.”
Ari Brand ’06, Seth Cohen ’07, Megan Diamondstein ’06, Alex Fishman ’07, Rebecca Josue ’06, Laurel Steinhauser ’05 and Lana Wilson ’05 also participate in the piece as actors, dancers, or a combination of the two.
Beaman commented on the versatility of the student performers.
“It’s been wonderful to work with actors who dance, and dancers who act,” she said.
Guest artist Thomas Baird, a renowned Baroque dance soloist, will also appear in “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” For the past 15 years, he has been actively involved in performing, choreographing and teaching Baroque-style dance, and last semester he was Artist-in-Residence at Wesleyan.
Beaman, who has been a faculty member in the dance department at Wesleyan for 13 years, and also teaches dance history at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, specializes in reconstructing and teaching Baroque dance.
After spending part of her sabbatical last semester in France, Beaman felt compelled to create a dance piece with a strong historical context, tying together dance with acting and music, a common artistic alliance that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Baroque period, dance often coexisted with other performance styles within the context of operas and plays.
“It’s really a combination of theater and dance, which has been interesting,” Bridger said.
Beaman chose to use Molières comedy-ballet to exemplify this historical convention because of its accessibility to different art forms and its comedic appeal.
“It offers a very funny plot, lots of dancing, and beautiful music,” Beaman said.
The piece was originally created for King Louis XIV by the collaboration between Molière, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and dancer Pierre Beauchamp. Beaman combines the traditional Baroque dance form of comedy-ballet with her own choreography to recreate the historically and culturally stylistic dance within a landscape accessible to contemporary viewers.
Cohen, who plays the part of Monsieur Jourdain’s dancing master, as well as Count Dorante, a nobleman who takes advantage of Jourdain, expressed whole-hearted enjoyment at participating in the faculty dance concert.
“My favorite part of the show has been watching the dancers, actually,” Cohen said. “Many of the dances are very creative, and everyone is extremely talented and animated.”
“The Bourgeois Gentleman” will debut at Wesleyan on Friday, Oct. 22 at 8 p.m. and on Saturday, Oct. 23 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets cost $6 for Wesleyan students and $8 for the general public. Buying tickets in advance is recommended.
Leave a Reply