At Blanca Li's Grand Ball

A vertigo of technology and glamour

by Valentina Bonelli

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As whimsical as anyone in crossing dance, film, art, Blanca Li always manages to to bring to life to everything she imagines, with creations animated by technology, shimmering with glamour.

Le Bal de Paris, a Chanel-branded immersive virtual reality show, encapsulates all the passions of an artist whose 30-year career marked by eclecticism has maintained her unmistakable style.

"I had a desire to create a show that did not yet exist and that I could not have imagined 20 years ago," Blanca Li says, alluding to to a path in which technological innovation never appeared surface, but consubstantial to the creative process.

This time, the choreographer and director allows us to live a thirty-five-minute long experience, dizzying for the senses, electrifying for perception, thanks to the sophisticated technology put to place from BackLight Studio for virtual reality and from Mocaplab for motion capture. Complex technical equipment from wear, consisting of a helmet to access virtual reality, a computer backpack (i.e., placed on the back like a backpack) and sensors strapped to the wrists and ankles, which literally allow us to enter the show. And since we enter it as guests at a grand ball, the likeness of the avatar each of us will have chosen should be dressed for the occasion.

"Viewers will be faced with to a magnificent virtual Chanel collection, created exclusively for the show, and will be able to choose the dress of their choice," Blanca Li enthusiastically explains. "Ten models of robe de soir from women's and six of tuxedos from men's are available, complete with shoes, bijoux, accessories: all in the unmistakable style of the maison... très parisien! I wanted anyone to have the experience of wearing a fabulous garment to participate to a masked ball: a dream come true... even if it is virtual."

She could not have chosen any other label Blanca Li, who at the premieres of her shows and on official occasions enhances the intensity of her Iberian beauty with the bold, oh-so-French elegance of Chanel. "I always pay a lot of attention to costumes in my creations: you know how much I love fashion!" smiles the artist. "For Le Bal de Paris, a project I started to working on more than two years ago, I had immediately thought to Chanel, because I was looking for a label that identified Parisian chic, since it is precisely in the Ville Lumière that my grand ball is held. Several times in the past I had collaborated with Karl Lagerfeld, and again this time my proposal was enthusiastically accepted by the fashion house, which became the exclusive production partner."

Contributing to the daring mystery of a masked ball are the imaginative masks with animal features that virtually appear on the faces of the participants: yet another coup de théâtre by an artist always happily inspired from hybrid creatures of mythological memory.

Thus equipped and attired, participants can move wherever curiosity drives them, dance from alone or in pairs, interact with other guests, and fully experience the three-act story Blanca Li has imagined.

The protagonist is Adèle, a young woman whose temperament and ambitions are so much like the author of the libretto. For both, the world is open to every adventure, artistic for Blanca, life for Adèle, but Paris remains the center of their universe. The virtual heroine returns there after traveling the world and at the grand ball her father has organized in her honor she finds among the guests of the tout Paris her first love, Pierre: after the first skirmishes due to a then painful farewell, the two fall in love again, strengthening the lost bond.

"I imagined Adèle as independent, dynamic, strong-willed, ready to to leave everything, even love, to follow and fulfill her own aspirations, proud to live the life she has chosen for herself. But I also wanted my protagonist to thrill viewers with her romantic nature and her newfound romance," explains the choreographer, who always cloaks her shows and films with compelling plots. All the more so in this show, which virtually takes its guests on an adventurous journey, to aboard a train and then a boat, into the three environments through which the story unfolds: a monumental from ballroom with soaring ceilings and huge chandeliers, a lush garden of greenery that becomes the set of a garden party, a typical Parisian club with dancers lining the stage where the party continues.

to guiding the participants are Adèle and Pierre themselves, played from two dancers from Blanca Li Dance Company. For if the focus is on technological effects and the fascination of the clothes, for Le Bal de Paris Blanca Li has also devised a choreography as finely composed as it is impressive as in her style, dense with contaminations: classical from her training from dancer, flamenco from Andalusia where she was born, d'antan from the dances from sala that she loves so much, rebellious from the hip-hop she met in the French banlieux. This time, however, her choreographic imagination had to come to to terms with the demands, if not the limitations, that the technical equipment on the dancers entailed. A constraint from little for an enthusiast like Blanca Li, who personally experimented with the equipment on her slender and nervous body, having as much fun as a child with a new toy, until to she found unexpected choreographic solutions from to pass on to her young dancers.

The creation also found momentum in the original musical score, entrusted to a lifelong collaborator, Tao Gutierrez, who blended sound suggestions as well as Blanca Li intertwined choreographic themes, to make the viewer's experience as seductive and electrifying as possible.

The enthusiasm was good for creation, which occurred at the height of the pandemic when there were very few opportunities to experience Le Bal de Paris in person, usable at each session from only ten participants. Coming back to to have an exclusive and at the same time communal experience was even moving after the long months of isolation that the theater world also suffered. Blanca Li will not forget the reactions of the show's participants (4,000 in three weeks!) when it debuts in December 2020 at Madrid's Teatro del Canal, which she directs. Sensations never experienced, from experience at least once in a lifetime - they all reported unanimously.

"That's exactly what I wanted," Blanca Li concludes with satisfaction, "for all participants to forget that they are in a virtual world and at the culmination of the collective and festive dimension of music and dance to think, "What an extraordinary experience I am having!"

For those who then wanted to live that experience privately, without the physical thrill of sensory contact, Blanca Li came up with to a film version of her show, so engaging and sophisticated from that it earned the "best award" in the "Venice VR Expanded" section of the 78th Venice International Film Festival, where it was in competition in 2021. The artist collected it happy and moved, looking beautiful in her Chanel grande soirée gown.