Gesualdo Passione: When Baroque Meets Hip Hop

Choreographer Amala Dianor and Les Arts Florissants bring together hip-hop dance and Renaissance polyphony in a work of devastating spiritual intensity.

Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th-century Italian composer, wrote sacred music of a dissonance so extreme that it would remain without an equivalent for centuries. His Répons des Ténèbres, polyphonic settings for Holy Week, sung a cappella, are works of unsettling emotional power, in which harmony seems to buckle under the weight of grief and contrition.

Gesualdo Passione is a new creation that places this music in dialogue with the body. Choreographer Amala Dianor, self-taught in hip-hop, later trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, and now one of the most distinctive voices in French contemporary dance, draws on a hybrid physical vocabulary that moves between classical technique, hip-hop and urban dance. His choreographic language, at once fluid and rigorous, strips movement back to its essential weight and tension. Here, four dancers embody the physicality of Christ and his suffering: a choreography that oscillates between flexibility and surrender, force and collapse.

Alongside them, six singers from Les Arts Florissants perform nine excerpts from the Répons a cappella, under the direction of Paul Agnew, co-musical director of the ensemble since 2019 and one of the foremost conductors of the Baroque repertoire. The encounter, staged at the Les Nuits de Fourvière festival in Lyon, is as unexpected as it is necessary.

Genre Live Show - ( Hip Hop, Choreography)
Production year 2026
Recording location Les Nuits de Fourvière Festival, Lyon, France
Director Fabien Raymond
Stage Director Paul Agnew
Choreography by Amala Dianor