LA NOCHE DE SAN JUAN (Soirées de Barcelona)
Compañía Antonio Ruz

Antonio Ruz Company

Header photo: La Nuit, original curtain by Joan Junyer, 1939.

Price: 30 and 28 €.

La noche de San Juan (Soirées de Barcelona), with music by Gerhard and choreography by Massine, was created in the 1930s for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo company with script by Ventura Gassol and sets by Joan Junyer.

Antonio Ruz recovers the ballet from the piano score, some sets and other preserved materials. The plot of the ballet is based on the script written by Ventura Gassol. The text begins with a preface of four verses by the poet Joan Maragall about love, the main theme of the story. The action takes place during the vigil, night and morning of St. John's Day and is set in Isil, a small town in the Pyrenees.

Inspired by the mythical night of the feast of St. John and the fire celebrations of the Catalan Pyrenees, Gerhard's music is full of quotations from popular songs still present in the rural areas of Catalonia.

The staging uses reproductions of the original sketches designed by Joan Junyer, inspired by the Pyrenean landscape and the festival that the creators knew in the 1930s.

"In my enthusiasm for accepting this invitation several ingredients come together, for me, very attractive: the fact that it is a project of recovery of forgotten repertoire, the unfavorable historical conjunctures so that its premiere never took place, the constellation of great artists that compose it and the context of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine of modernist cut, which drinks from rites and popular dances as in some ballets of Stravinsky. Inspired by all this valuable historical material, my goal as director and choreographer is to offer a contemporary dance piece bathed in theatricality and dynamism and accompanied by an effective staging without artifice. The seven performers will carry, with their bodies, the narrative weight of the work, supported by the live interpretation of Gerhard's revised score by the pianist Miguel Baselga, the projections with the original curtains by Junyer, the lighting design by Olga García and the costumes by Rosa García Andujar. A new artistic challenge that our company faces with commitment, respect and great enthusiasm."

ANTONIO RUZ

Music Roberto Gerhard
Scenography Joan Junyer
Plot Ventura Gassol

ANTONIO RUZ COMPANY

Direction and choreography: Antonio Ruz
Dance and choreographic collaboration: Melania Olcina Elia López, Carmen Fumero, Begoña Quiñones, Pau Aran, Miguel Zomas, Julián Lazzaro.
Piano: Miguel Baselga

The music is performed in the composer's own piano version and the set reproduces the original Pirineu de nit curtain. Ballet 'La Nuit de la Saint Jean' by Joan Junyer.

ARTISTIC TEAM
Figurinist: Rosa García Andújar
Lighting design: Olga García (AAI)
Assistant director: Lucía Bernardo
Production (SPECTARE) Paola Villegas and Gabriel Blanco
Distribution (TINA AGENCY) Valeria Cosi

Research and documentation Mònica Tarré i Pedreira
Music edition (unpublished) Juan de Udaeta
Revision of the edition Miguel Baselga
Curtain reproduction Dolores Iglesias

A Fundación Juan March and Gran Teatre del Liceu production

The header image is by Dolores Iglesias, inspired by Junyer's original curtain, 1939:

RELATED ACTIVITIES:

Conference La Noche de San Juan. With Antonio Ruz and Miguel Balsega
15/10/21 - 19:30