One after the other, men and women cross the stage from side to side in a long procession. Half-lit, nothing really enables to distinguish them from one another. Even their outfit color looks similar. Some fall, get up, go back, but all of them end up moving forward and disappearing in a sort of continuous movement. That's how funeral dances were represented in the Middle Ages. Such paintings and drawings show poor, rich, young, old, sick, and healthy walking all together behind a cringing skeleton to show that, before death, everyone is judged equally.

Nocturnes by Chopin are romantic pieces for solo piano written in the 19th century, which accompany this melancholic movement. They inspired Thierry Malandain this version of funeral dances and became the name of the ballet. The twenty-two dancers seem to be the characters of a long mural happening right before your eyes. They move forward, alone or as a couple, hold hands or follow the group, sometimes push one another, run, or start shaking. If most of them become resigned to their scheduled end, some still try to escape it. They fight, pull the others back, arch or interlock to better resist their fate.

But whatever they do, they seem to have already lost the depth and weight of their lives. Their movements bring them irresistibly back towards Earth which will soon collect their bodies. The distance between cour and jardin (that’s the name given to the left and right sides of the stage) become the separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

And yet, even when doomed to go "to the other side", men still take the time to dance together. The beauty of music comforts their fears, in an almost sacred communion. It also eases the one who, at the last moment, was tempted in vain to escape his fate.