Sawt Falasteen - Versailles orchestra plays New York in 'Affair of the Poisons'

Monday's immersive show "Versailles in Printemps: The Affair of the Poisons" centered on France's 17th-century period of excess and seediness that its creator, Andrew Ousley, told AFP has parallels to the present day.

At the evening staged in Manhattan's new Printemps luxury emporium, guests and performers alike donned velvet waistcoats, silky corsets, feathered headdresses and powdered makeup.

Core to the performance's tale was the discovery of arsenic, Ousley said -- the first "untraceable, untasteable poison."

"Everybody was just poisoning everybody."

And at the web's center? A midwife and fortune teller named La Voisin, he said, a "shadowy-like person who basically would peddle poison, peddle solutions, peddle snake oil."

"She was the nexus," Ousley continued, in a scheme that "extended up to Louis XIV, his favorite mistresses" -- inner circles rife with backstabbing and murder plots.

The poisoning scandal resulted in a tribunal that resulted in dozens of death sentences -- until the king called it off when it "got a little too close to home," Ousley said with a smile.

"To me, it speaks to the present moment -- that this rot can fester underneath luxury and wealth when it's divorced from empathy, from humanity."

Along with a program of classical music, the performance included elaborately costumed dancers, including one who tip-toed atop a line of wine bottles in sparkling platform heels.

The drag opera artist Creatine Price was the celebrant of the evening's so-called "Black Mass," and told AFP that the night was "a beautiful way to sort of incorporate the ridiculousness, the campness, the farce of Versailles with a modern edge."

Drag is "resistance," she said, adding that her act is "the essence of speaking truth to power, because it really flies in the face of everything in the opera that is standard, whether it's about gender or voice type."

- Period instruments -

The Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra formed in 2019, and its first stateside tour is underway: the series of shows kicked off at Festival Napa Valley in California before heading to New York.

On Wednesday it will play another, more traditional show at L'Alliance New York, a French cultural center in Manhattan.

The orchestra aims to champion repertoire primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries, and plays on period instruments.

"Playing a historical instrument really gives me a feeling of being in contact with the era in which the music was composed," said Alexandre Fauroux, who plays the natural horn, a predecessor to the French horn distinguished by its lack of valves.

Ousley runs the organization Death of Classical, an arts non-profit that puts on classical shows in unexpected places, including the catacombs of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery and crypts in Manhattan.

Monday's spectacle included over-the-top performance, but Ousley emphasized that the evening was ultimately a celebration of classical artists.

"These are players who play with such energy, to me it's more like a rock band than an orchestra," he said.

And the mission of putting on such shows is about something bigger, Ousley said: "How do you fight against the darkness that seems to be winning in the world?"

"When you can sit and feel, with a group of strangers, something that you know you feel together -- that's why I work, because of that shared connection, experience and transcendence."

B.Khalifa--SF-PST