Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2012, Orphée & Eurydice: Danse et mythologie documents the making of a contemporary staging of Gluck’s opera. Its subject is not the myth alone, nor performance as a finished spectacle, but the conversation through which a production takes shape: a sequence of interlinked interviews involving choreographer Frédéric Flamand and his partners, including the visual artist Hans Op de Beeck. The book gives readers access to the questions, references, and decisions behind the work rather than reducing it to a record of the stage.
Flamand’s practice is presented through its sustained dialogue between past and present, and through a refusal to keep classical and contemporary dance in separate compartments. The Orpheus and Eurydice story becomes a point of contact between opera, choreography, visual art, and mythology’s continuing place in contemporary society. The collaboration with Op de Beeck is especially important here: it frames the production as an exchange across artistic disciplines, not as a single-author statement.
The setting adds a further historical dimension. The opera was staged at the Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles, a venue inaugurated in 1770 for the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and recently restored at the time of publication. That context places the modern production in active relation to a site associated with the careful presentation of historical art. The book therefore follows a double movement—back toward Gluck and the symbolic architecture of Versailles, and forward toward new forms of dance and visual interpretation.
For collectors, its distinction lies in this combination of documentation and reflection. The 96-page hardcover, issued in French and English and containing 50 colour illustrations, is conceived as an account of artistic process: an illustrated, bilingual record of collaboration, rehearsal in thought, and the translation of mythology into contemporary performance. It is best approached not as a conventional monograph by a single photographer, but as a cross-disciplinary publication about how a major stage work is imagined, shaped, and situated.
