“L’homme et son désir [Man and his desire] was conceived by Paul Claudel in Rio de Janeiro, in Petropolis, in 1917. The Brazilian “ambiance” experienced by Claudel and shared with Darius Milhaud, who was his secretary at the time, and who composed the music, is an important part of this ballet conceived as a plastic drama, “ … the residents’ turbulence, the grandiloquence of the landscapes, an extravagance in the design of the bay.” The principle of L’homme et son désir is based on Brazil, and dreamed of in Brazil. It has elements of the theme of Nijinsky’s well-known L’après-midi d’un faune [Afternoon of a faun], that of unsatisfied desire. Claudel admitted he had been impressed by this half‑horse, half‑man figure performed by Nijinsky, for whom the principal role in his own ballet had been planned, but who in the end did not dance it. It was therefore again Jean Börlin who performed the central role in this little drama situated in the Brazilian forest. The forest itself is not depicted onstage, but it is represented by various  temptations/ forces – a universe filled with souvenirs, desires, dangers – directed toward the sleeping man, a scene of savagery. The forest is also acoustic, created by the chaos ot the musical instruments. Here a man on his own at nightfall becomes the prey of a woman who is in fact dead. A sculptural dream for Claudel, or perhaps an autobiographical pantomime.

This dream forest by Claudel reminds me of the imagination of a virgin Amazon which goes in hand with the disappearing of the aboriginal, native populations which are barely mentioned in history. Creating a sort of “neutral landscape” for an autobiographical story of a man and his desire for two women, Claudel’s rain forest brings us back to the idea of a constructed nature, both passive and impotent. Looking at the image of two women subject to the desire of a single man, he presents himself as master of a colonizatory situation. L’homme et son désir is for me a “ballet of negation”: it denies its territory by making it into a stage set; it denies the reality of those from the rain forest by relegating them to be wild, voiceless creatures. By doing this he makes any commonality impossible, creating instead a narcissistic fable. To counter this idea of a meaningless earth without inhabitants, I propose Érosion, a story of a clump of soil taking its revenge, erupting, making the ground shake and taking down the supposedly virile, dominant male eros.

To propose Érosion one hundred years after L’homme et son désir is my attempt to evoke the eco‑cide which has been going on for centuries in Brazil, recently reinforced by a deliberately hard‑right government position. The forest ballet is contrasted with the eroding soil which is devastating the policies of an Eros with no collective power. With Érosion, I explore this oversight as well as the policy of extraction including both natural and human resources. What I would like to erode is not the earth, instead the obliterations of our possible worlds, the negations of life forms, common territories and struggling bodies.

Among the aesthetic elements of the piece by the Swedish Ballet, I suggest focusing on the juxtaposition of disparate realities which present an ambiguous world; simultaneous actions creating a polyphony blending dance, theatre, music, plastic arts, and the style of a form of praise for madness, the night and the ghost-like presence of human existence. Daily life, dreams, desire, despair – are some of the elements which also contribute to this piece which critics called an “anti-ballet” but which are planned by its creator to be a complete work of art. For me this will also have a dream component, the enigmatic power of this piece at the moment of its creation; as a Brazilian jungle horribly abused, burned and forgotten by its hard right rulers; as a story paying homage to the work of the unconscious, of the night, of dreams; as an orchestration of repressed, feverish, contradictory and dream-like forces. A new argument fit for this 2022 creation: an eroding world, eroding eros, but our global drama is fully erect.”

Volmir Cordeiro