Who are these witches who work for the loss of Dido, oppressed between her duty as Queen and her feelings of love for Aeneas? And this "Spirit" who reminds Aeneas of his destiny to go and build the new Rome?
Intrigued by the construction that Purcell wanted to mirror the terrestrial world and the world of evil voices, inspired by the chorus "great souls conspire against themselves" , this show plunges into the heart of the contradictions inherent in each human being, in this work whose conciseness generates a density that leaves you dazzled, weeping with the choir of angels the fall of Dido.
The visions that each era invents for the invisible forces that guide our behaviors are put into perspective:
- The gods in Virgil's Aeneid , with a bun of jealous goddesses (Juno against Venus) which precipitates Dido's destiny.
-The English imaginary of witches , added by Purcell's librettist, inspired by Shakespeare.
-The complex depth of the human psyche explored in our time with the role that unconscious or repressed feelings play in what happens to us.
The cave is a good illustration of this overlapping of visions : sheltering the loves of Aeneas and Dido in Virgil, it becomes the den of witches in Purcell, while we play with its baroque symbol of mental space.
With a scenography all in tulle inspired by Robert Irwin, costumes designed according to a parallel between Elisabeth 1st and Dido, recreating the English atmosphere specific to witches, and the choice that each role of the Court sings a role of the Night, it is It is a question of highlighting the interplay between the different forces that inhabit us and exploring how this leads to what happens to us, from integration to disintegration, from repression to devouring...
Similarly, the choir has a pivotal role in the work, and was worked on the theme of chimeras, in the sense of Antiquity: taking desires for realities . Thus, in the same distorted relationship to reality, the chimeras born of desires summon fears , twin sisters machinists of a macabre dance between heroism and death .
A prologue has been reconstructed, inspired by that of the original libretto of Dido & Aeneas , of the descent into hell of Aeneas told by Virgil, of Ovid and of Shakespeare, highlighting the role of singing and writing as transcendence and edification of the dead among the living.
All of the lights, costumes and scenography allow you to play on opacity and transparency, but also translucency and blindness, the blurring between reality and imagination, memory and erasure .
