Hip-hop street tricks are combined with dancing on pointe (however, deliberately awkward – it is a mockery), and it all happens under baroque music - isn't it madness? Of course, madness, that is «folia» - is one of the translations of the performance title. Hip-hop is Mourad Merzouki's favorite style: as a child, the French choreographer was fond of martial arts and the circus, and when he was fifteen, he saw teenagers competing in stunting on the street, and he was inspired to do that too! Since then, he has been crossing hip-hop with video, acrobatics, capoeira, and now with baroque music. He released Folia with authentic conductor Franck-Emmanuel Comte and his ensemble Concert de l'Hostel Dieu. Originally composed for Merzouki's own company, this production is brought to us by the contemporary company of the San Martín Theater, a company with a fifty-year history, specializing in choreography of the 20th and 21st centuries. And so, accompanied by the patterned music the dancers come out not in some lace collars, but in simple pants and shirts, and, complicating their dance more and more, they reveal the excitement of the Baroque, the energy of this era, its grin and its fury. In the finale, when one of the dancers begins to spin in a dervish dance, the audience is ready to start dancing too. And the dancers don't mind at all, just as their predecessors did not mind five hundred years ago.