unRAVELed

Following the success of Berberio (2016), Revue Blanche and Zonzo Compagnie are teaming up again to focus on an iconic composer: Maurice Ravel. WIThWIT will provide the scenography and, as with THELONIOUS (2019), it will be directed by Benjamin Vandewalle.

The mysterious dandy Maurice Ravel captures our imagination. He was a master at bringing different musical worlds to life, from folk melodies and fairy tales like Ma Mère l'Oye to structural experiments like orchestral music without music. The latter was how he described his Boléro; who would have ever thought that the whole world would be able to whistle this piece?

As a child, Ravel was strongly influenced by his father, who was an inventor. His fascination with mechanics is reflected in a scene constructed analogously. In UnRAVELed, we travel from outside to inside, from macro to micro. Starting with a large, open ocean, we zoom in on a city, a house, a room, on and on, until we enter the radar work of Ravel's own mind.

The scene itself builds up step by step, unfolding into a life-size set, into a machine that produces sound and a shadow play in which mysteries are hidden. Small spotlights illuminate scale models in Plexiglas into large, moving shadows that form the environment in which the performers find themselves. We hear mechanical machines that produce sound, movements that also make sound, loop stations where not only musicians are duplicated but the delightful music of the master himself, too.

We see Ravel as a child, and the child that remains somewhere in everyone's soul.