Review: Le cri des méduses Is a Sensorial Feast

The Dance Current

Alan Lake Factorie draws inspiration from Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa to create a surreal, shocking theatrical world.

Gruesome, absurd, yet strangely fascinating, Le cri des méduses by Quebec-based dance company Alan Lake Factorie captures the horror and drama of its subject in a dreamlike 75-minute performance.

In his 1819 masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa, French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault displayed a darker side of humanity. The twenty-three-foot painting recounts a grotesque moment in history involving a French shipwreck off the coast of Africa, where a scramble for survival on a makeshift raft led to the dehydration, starvation, murder and cannibalism of over 130 people…