PROJECT LAUNCH: Amor de Lonh
2026-09-11 - 2026-09-20
Please join us this Fall beginning Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 20, 2026 for the project launch of Amor De Lonh in the Dordogne Valley, southern France.
Amor De Lonh (“love from afar”) is a two-year commissioned live art work by Association Patrimoine et Culture de Mayrinhac Lentour and Marais de Bonnefont Marsh Reserve created in – situ for various historic culture sites in Southwest France’s Dordogne Valley.
American choreographer lauri stallings and the Accroc’coeur choir led by Lola Calvet, alongside a team of international dancers and musicians, poets and visual artists will interact with minimalist site-specific installations developed in collaboration with Artzimu*t association Association, Preservation of Taillefer Castle, and the Friends of William Merwin Association. Conceived as an evolving, episodic residency, Amor de Lonh follows insights of the 12th – century French troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, his dansa, or balada (“dance songs”), and Ventadour’s profound influence over American poet W.S. Merwin on the central importance of themes of distance: the distance between the present and the past, the lover and the beloved, and one place and another. Themes of distance deeply resonated with Merwin and can also be felt in stallings’ choreographic work, where distance is a metaphor for a lost past, environmental degradation, and the challenge of connecting across time and space through our bodies.
TIMELINE September 14, 2026 – October 30, 2027
