Work in progress – KILL ME GENTLY

Artistic Statement:

“This rewriting of Swan Lake, KILL ME GENTLY: Swan lake, a beautiful obscenity, is a piece for four dancers choreographed by Catarina Barbosa, based on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. In the traditional myth, a prince falls in love with Odette, a princess cursed by an evil sorcerer, doomed to be a woman by night and a swan by day. Only love can save her. At a ball, the prince intends to declare his love to Odette but is deceived by the sorcerer’s magic: instead of professing his love to Odette, he declares it to Odile, the Black Swan, the sorcerer’s daughter and Odette’s evil double. Several endings exist, but most are tragic: Odette, knowing she is doomed to remain a swan, commits suicide, and the prince follows her into death.

However, far from representing the traditional and Manichean opposition between Odette the pure and Odile the evil, KILL ME GENTLY: Swan lake, a beautiful obscenity explores a new side of the myth, where Odile is no longer the usurper, but the one who dares—breaking free from Odette’s innocent gentleness. The two become two sides of the same face: that of conquered freedom.

It is no longer the tragic story of an innocent defeated by evil, but one of transformation and rebirth. From Odette the chrysalis springs the flight of Odile. It is the pivotal, fateful moment of the emergence of the self. The Black Swan becomes the one who understands that innocence must die for something deeper to be born.

It is the story of real, vast, raw life, lurking beneath gentleness. That of a feminine power finally liberated from mystifying archetypes.

It is the story of emancipation through destruction.

This creation is a quartet that reinterprets the myth of Swan Lake by turning symbols upside down and questioning them anew, allowing the visceral power of freedom to emerge from illusions, fantasies, death, and calm waters.”