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Since the fifteenth century Joan of Arc has crossed the borders of France to become the symbol of the yearning for the future and the fight against evil that expands and contracts over time. Arthur Honneger and Paul Claudel understood this with this piece, which today we cannot understand without evoking Nazism and its consequences during World War II.

This mise en scene of Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher also grows into another dimension and is situated in the present time. Our daily evil breaks through in the form of the starked greed and unleashes completely irrational forces like different kinds of fanaticism, reactionary movements, exclusive and charged with hate, in addition to causing the exhaustion of the system. Uncertainty augurs a future marked by feudal structures that would represent the emergence of a New Middle Ages. Dark times for the aesthetic that has characterised La Fura dels Baus since its foundation.

Before this universe of degeneration and nightmare, Joan of Arc is still able to illuminate with her purity. That is why we have chosen as a prologue the light of the lyric poem La Demoiselle élue, by Claude Debussy.

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