Versailles orchestra plays New York in 'Affair of the Poisons'
Monday's immersive show "Versailles in Printemps: The Affair of the Poisons" centered on France's 17th-century period of excess and seediness that its creator, Andrew Ousley, told AFP has parallels to the present day.
At the evening staged in Manhattan's new Printemps luxury emporium, guests and performers alike donned velvet waistcoats, silky corsets, feathered headdresses and powdered makeup.
Core to the performance's tale was the discovery of arsenic, Ousley said -- the first "untraceable, untasteable poison."
"Everybody was just poisoning everybody."
And at the web's center? A midwife and fortune teller named La Voisin, he said, a "shadowy-like person who basically would peddle poison, peddle solutions, peddle snake oil."
"She was the nexus," Ousley continued, in a scheme that "extended up to Louis XIV, his favorite mistresses" -- inner circles rife with backstabbing and murder plots.
The poisoning scandal resulted in a tribunal that resulted in dozens of death sentences -- until the king called it off when it "got a little too close to home," Ousley said with a smile.
"To me, it speaks to the present moment -- that this rot can fester underneath luxury and wealth when it's divorced from empathy, from humanity."
Along with a programme of classical music, the performance included elaborately costumed dancers, including one who tip-toed atop a line of wine bottles in sparkling platform heels.
The Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra formed in 2019, and its first stateside tour is underway: the series of shows kicked off at Festival Napa Valley in California before heading to New York.
On Wednesday, it will play another, more traditional show at L'Alliance New York, a French cultural centre in Manhattan.
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