Born in the 16th century in England, the "masks", or rather masks , had the characteristics of mixing music, song, dance, theater, grandiloquent decorations... in the service of a figure of power whose qualities were praised. All elements that would later flourish in the Baroque gesture and that we find in French court performances. Cupid & Death, a mask with five entrances, begins with an inversion: Cupid shoots his arrows at two lovers and kills them, while death stings with points of love two old men ready to die. The libretto by playwright James Shirley, adapted from an Aesop fable, imagines the consequences of what love become dead and death transformed into love would generate: a capital chaos where polarities are reversed, where nature goes mad and enemies discover themselves friends…
A spirited variation of deadly love that the duo of directors Jos Houben and Emily Wilson, accustomed to discrepancies and games of bodies and objects ( La Princesse lumière , 2017), will passionately renew.
