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After I found an excerpt from Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes I played it repeatedly for several days until Helen bought the DVDs of the William Christie-directed production by Les Arts Florissants. Patricia Petibon is magnetic in the Fourth Entree, Les Sauvages; what a voice.

I read an suggestion that the depiction of the ‘savages’, Les Indes, was somehow racist.  That’s an obtusely achronistic objection to an early 18th-century ‘Opera-Ballet’ – but even on its own terms it’s way off the mark in this very funny reminder of how baffled and  amused a French audience  would have been by American exoticana. Although Rousseau’s misplaced romantic propaganda would come slightly later, the Noble Savage was already a trope.  It was a century before de Tocqueville surveyed American society; the Enlightment hadn’t yet got a full head of steam.This was another age.

Petibon’s chicken dance, corn-cob pipe in mouth, seems a perfect contemporary translation of the garbled travellers’ tales and cod cultural anthropology that would have informed a 1735 European’s view of Native American habits.

Christie’s production  brilliantly recaptures the remote, unfamiliar and somewhat enviable edges of the known World that would have made such an impressive spectacle for audiences nearly 300 years ago.

Unmissable.

William Christie’s splendid production, starring Nicolas Rivenq and Patricia Petibon