Flanders-based Les Ballets C de la B are world-renowned for their collaborative ventures and breaking down conventional barriers while placing multiculturalism at the epicentre of each work they create. Requiem pour L. confirms this in the best possible way: Mozart’s emblematic swan song provides the perfect condition for an unprecedented fusing of musical traditions from lands across Europe and Africa.Under the direction of composer Fabrizio Cassol, fourteen musicians from different continents reworked Mozart’s Requiemfusing the classical masterpiece with jazz, opera, popular African music, and lyrics in Latin,Lingala and Swahili.

Director and choreographer Alain Platel augments this modern interpretation by visually and physically translating the images and associations the requiem evokes from the funeral hymn to the mass grave in which Mozart himself was dumpedto build a visual world of death and ritual for the musicians and dancers to inhabit. Requiem pour L. is a deeply philosophical work that translates our anxieties about mortality into art and poignantly offers a glorification of the lives and deaths that we cannot control.

African première: Tue 28 May 2019, Market Theatre, Johannesburg

Further performances: Wed 29 May 2019, Market Theatre, Johannesburg

Age restriction: 16+ (sensitive images)

Tickets: https://markettheatre.co.za/flemish/