Company Chordelia

Les Amoureux is the latest piece to hit the stage by Company Chordelia, and doesn’t disappoint: filled with imagination, enchanting movement and excellent visuals, it is an emotional, haunting and erotically-charged dance piece. It is based on Angela Carter’s 1979 book, The Lady of the House of Love, a book of short stories derived from fairytales and folk stories. Les Amoureux is a Sleeping Beauty inspired tale of love, lust, and danger, the piece following a Vampire Countess who is dealt the ‘Lovers’ tarot card, resulting in the arrival of a virginal soldier and her eventual death.

The production is unsettling from the outset, with a coffin shaped window cut into the backdrop suggesting the outcome of the play: two curled up bodies rise upwards from the floor and mark the beginning of a perverse and fantastical piece of dance-theatre.

Operatic music accompanies the movement, including a beautiful solo sung by the soldier, along with wind chimes and, in the fighting climax of the piece, thunderbolts and lightning. Costume and set are beautifully handled – there is an element of decay in the shredded strips of fabric that form trees; the ripped, tattered wedding dress; and the torn gown of the maid, exposing her crinoline. It all combines to form something beautiful, however, enthused by rich, red roses and lanterns. The mischievous shadows of the countess are dressed in black tailcoats and furry tales, almost resembling rodents as they paw and claw and taunt the countess.

Les Amoureux is twisted, wicked and bizarre in the most brilliant of ways. A distorted, morbid take on a fairytale classic: soldiers and vampires and murder – oh my!