Rococo rager

Party Like It’s 1699 resurrects
18th-century youth culture cool

PERIWIG-ING OUT: Party Like It’s 1699

by SACHA JACKSON

Classical music in all its variations—romantic, contemporary, Classical classical—shares one thing: the common view that it’s dull, old-people music.

“It’s always sort of bothered me that I could go see a band like Fleet Foxes and be super-pumped about it, and go with friends who felt the same way,” says Aleks Schürmer, “and then go to a concert of Bach and wonder why, if I share these same aesthetic points with my friends, they don’t like this?”

It’s been roughly three years since Schürmer, artistic director of the postmodern baroque spectacle Party Like It’s 1699, started mulling over the idea of mounting this type of performance. “It’s kind of a weird thing in the first place, what I do,” says Schürmer, referring to his role as a flutist in the baroque ensemble les Tabarnaks d’Époque and his masters degree in historical performance (though he also plays in rock bands). “It’s not like going to see the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. They might be playing old music but they’re playing on new instruments and playing the way they play classical music now. It’s quite different from the way things were done in previous centuries.

“I always thought, if I’m going to go to all this effort of doing historical performance, then why am I going to present it in this late 20th century, drab, boring way?”

Party Like It’s 1699 is anything but boring. Using pieces by composers like de Visée, Couperin and Clérambault, original music by David Simard, soprano Ariane Girard and the hostessing and poetry prowess of supermodel Irina Lazareanu (“She’s just one of my buddies,” he says), Schürmer will attempt to recreate the atmosphere of hip youth culture such as it was in the 18th century. “These were young people and this was something cool. It was the new music. Going to the opera back then was probably like going to Justice now.”

Alongside the musicians, the wigs, the authentic instruments and the storyboard set, there will be dancing. Choreographed by some of Montreal’s best young dancers/choreographers, Dana Michel, Andrew Tay, Mélissa Raymond and Sasha Kleinplatz, the dance portion of the event, though inspired by baroque gestures and movement, will be decidedly more edgy and contemporary.

“I wanted to keep the idea that there was new movement and new design in [baroque-era] shows. These choreographers are people whose movement is really different. It can be shocking and grotesque, moving and beautiful. I thought it would be interesting to have this old music with new movement.”

For Schürmer, it’s all about exposing the baroque period as the hedonistic, excessive, culture-defining era it was. Marie “Let them eat cake” Antoinette, Voltaire and Casanova are names that defined the luxury and attitudes of the era, as was the progression of musical sensibilities.

“Everything we listen to now, be it rap, electronic music or indie rock, the base of that harmonic framework was all standardized and codified in the baroque period. All the rules, someone figured it out 300 or 400 years ago.”

AT INTERSTICE (242 YOUNG),
AUG. 3–5, 8 P.M., $10