D'où rayonne la nuit ・ Comédie-Française

Molière and Lully. Their ten-year collaboration in the service of Louis XIV was to yield no fewer than twelve productions.

Then the parting of ways, a year before Molière’s death, when words and music suddenly no longer chimed in harmony. What went on creatively and on a human level between this artistic couple who produced – sometimes in a matter of days – works that have since acquiring mythical status? As if in a small laboratory where they are engaged in research, six actors from the Troupe, accompanied by a cellist and a theorbist, revive Lully’s music and retrace the dazzling and ambivalent trajectory of this collaboration.

Yoann Gasiorowski borrows the title “D’où rayonne la nuit” (Whence the night shines) from Victor Hugo, as if to echo the versatility of the context that saw the birth of the comédie-ballet, a form we owe to Molière and Lully. In this musical show, which moves fluidly and naturally between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries, Yoann Gasiorowski wrote the text and directed the play, his first time directing his fellow sociétaires of the Troupe. Accompanied by Vincent Leterme for all the musical arrangements, he conceived his show as a musical impromptu, choosing the latter term “because, in the manner of L’Impromptu de Versailles, we will see the artists of the Troupe at work”, and the term musical “because these artists will above all try to rehearse, to sing and to appropriate the baroque register, in their own way”. And to conclude with the words of Jean de La Fontaine, as if to announce the theme of this event: “I do not call gaiety that which causes laughter, but a certain charm, a pleasant air that can be given to any kind of subject, even the most serious.”
Yoann Gasiorowski

With the patronage of Haribo Ricqlès Zan

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