3
Jul/18

BRIC CELEBRATE BROOKLYN! FESTIVAL — LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉAL: LEONARD COHEN’S DANCE ME

3
Jul/18
Leonard Cohen

Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal will present U.S. premiere of Dance Me in Prospect Park on July 6

Prospect Park Bandshell
Prospect Park
Ninth St. & Prospect Park West
Friday, July 6, free, 8:00
www.bricartsmedia.org
www.bjmdanse.ca

In November 2016, Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen passed away at the age of eighty-two. The poet, singer-songwriter, novelist, and Zen monk left behind a six-decade legacy of investigating love and the human condition like no one else. In 1972, the year after Cohen released one of his masterpieces, Songs of Love and Hate, Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal was founded, a company dedicated to merging classical dance with more contemporary styles. On July 6, the troupe will present the U.S. premiere of Dance Me at the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of the free BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. The eighty-minute piece was commissioned, prior to Cohen’s death, for Montreal’s 375th anniversary and debuted in Canada last December. Set to songs from throughout Cohen’s long career and organized around the cycles of existence as experienced through the changing seasons, Dance Me was conceived by BJM artistic director Louis Robitaille and is choreographed by Andonis Foniadakis, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, and Ihsan Rustem for fourteen performers, with musical direction by Martin Léon, scenic design by Pierre-Étienne Locas, lighting by Cédric Delorme-Bouchard and Simon Beetschen, video by Hub Studio (Gonzalo Soldi, Thomas Payette, and Jeremy Fassio), sound by Guy Fortin, and costumes by Philippe Dubuc. On December 20, 2012, Cohen played the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, opening the show with “Dance Me to the End of Love,” from his 1984 album Various Positions, in which he croons, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin / Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in / Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove / Dance me to the end of love.” BJM’s Dance Me should lift the Brooklyn audience in the beautiful confines of Prospect Park.