ANN ARBOR, Mich.–Many of the most memorable images in Ballet Preljocaj’s ballet “La Fresque” involve women’s hair.

Seated on a cube, five women whip their long straight hair in tandem between moments of spiraling into each other’s seated positions, as if in a strangely sexy and mesmerizing head-banging game of musical chairs.

They’re a painting come to life through one man’s point of view, a man whose perspective becomes that of the audience, most recently at the Power Center as part of the University Musical Society’s 2019 winter program.

Based on the 18th Century Chinese fairy tale “The Painting on the Wall,” “La Fresque” premiered in 2016 in Ballet Preljocaj’s home theater in Aix-en-Provence, and is one of several of Artistic Director Angelin Preljocaj’s ballets dedicated to collaboration and re-imagining beloved tales. In short, it’s a storybook ballet unlike any you’ve ever seen. 

With influences of classical ballet technique, traditional Chinese dance, as well as celebrated modern dance innovators including Merce Cunningham, “La Fresque” is an 80-minute continuous ballet set to eclectic and largely electronic music by Nicolas Godin that tells the story of a young man so transfixed by an image of a woman in a painting, he is transported into the world of the artwork and marries her. After years of bliss, he is run out of the painting by warriors and returns to life outside the painting as if no time had passed.

More symbolic than literal, the ballet is shot through with French existentialism and at once breaks down the veil between art and lived experience as well as offers a subtle critique of heteronormativity.
Women’s hair, symbolic of femininity and maidenhood, is at turns wildly seductive and a tether to its owners.

In one astonishing section of the dance, five women in white cropped tops and Capri tights (Azzedine Alaïa) are tethered by long, black ropey silks attached to their heads. They lean into it and swing from it before male partners step up into the hair and entangle their legs in it before leaving the women to entwine themselves in it, hang upside-down and suspend from it; then with subtle belly dance, they walk away, untethered.

The most joyful dancing is among men, though often heavy and earth-bound in quality, there is a lightness of spirit in the pas de deux between men. The women, too, are most impassioned when dancing with each other, in one particular dance that’s part do-si-do, part leapfrog, they jump sideways in a phenomenal twist on the grand jeté.

Much of the dancing by this astonishingly small cast of 10 is terrifically inventive and athletic, with muscular lifts, lifted scissor kicks, modern port du bras with straight clapping arms as well as pas de deuxes with waving arms as if the dancers are sea creatures amid jellyfish floating in a starry night sky. Images such as this are the magnificent handiwork of set and video designer Constance Guisset in collaboration with lighting designer Éric Soyer. Along with floating, smoky projected images of fabric or perhaps flowing hair, it’s moody and fascinating to watch even if it doesn’t entirely make narrative sense.