Six performers naked on stage. Three women and three men playing one character, originally played by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Herman Diephuis has stripped the universally-acclaimed musical by Robert Wise down to the bare essentials: the songs – and the numerous remakes that were made – and the image of Maria, the young governess whose indestructible optimism changes the life of an Austrian family, in spite of the threat of Nazism.

From the outset, the statement is clear. The objective was not to reproduce a minor version – even less a simplified version of one of the greatest Hollywood classics of all time but to decipher, through working on voice and body, just what has made this film of mythical status, so powerful over the decades. A similar approach is reminiscent of D'après J.-C., created in 2004 and Dalila et Samson, par exemple created in 2005, his two preceding opuses, in which Herman Diephuis did not hesitate to call into question and lay bare the fundamentals of traditional Western art. In the same manner, the choreographer ponders over the image of the new contemporary precept, communicative happiness, to better dismantle its manipulation. No need to knock anyone senseless with a didactic message or unequivocal interpretation. The layout and the performers’ acting suffices to express the trouble, the irony, the detachment, the critique, the adherence or even the boredom that the imposed model of ‘happiness at all costs’ generates. 

When placed facing the audience, the six « Julies » each give their vocal and gestural version of the main hits from the film, their mute performance, mimed, sung or simply offbeat refuses the different facets of the human condition. That which, without being totally duped by the marketing of optimism, seems however, to be eternally ready to believe in the impossible and believe in the world of make-believe, « the best of worlds ». In this parade of postures, Coltrane’s auditory intrusion, at the end of the performance, resounds like an electroshock: it is in one’s self, in the free dismantling of the gestures and sounds and not through the repetition of imposed images, that each of us finds – or doesn’t find – his or her truth. As for the final, a cappella melody, sung in unison with neither artifice nor escape route, it in no way resembles a happy ending, beyond the fake harmony of words and notes, a form of listening and understanding via the valid presence of the bodies. 

A melody of what is sensitive and living.

Isabelle Calabre