For the Festival Montpellier Danse, Mathilde Monnier and Jean-François Duroure have devised a new staging of their first two joint shows - Pudique acide and Extasis - prompted by a desire to reclaim and impart the stuff of creation, with two new dancers now in the choreographers’ shoes. This restaging also reasserts a commitment to unbridled youth and to a passion for raw existence. Both pieces, the first created in New York in 1984, the second in Lyon one year later, tackle dance - and especially the duo figure – at the crux of archetypal forms and novel concerns that were then in the air.

It so happens that both shows were created in the thick of American Abstraction - Cunningham’s inevitable legacy to European dancers -, and assert the primacy of a two-way hand-to-hand as an act that is more theatrical than merely formalist. Even if the dance unfolds wordlessly, it comes up with a different way of talking due to its fundamentally expressionist, combative and humorous nature. The obvious references to Kurt Weill, and to a dream world that the authors call impish, drape these dance-acts with the claims of punk and hip hop, in order to translate them into a world brimming with energy. A breathless atmosphere under the sunlamps of a Berliner cabaret… lise ott – for the program of festival montpellier danse 2011

choreography mathilde monnier & jean-françois duroure
music kurt weill, bernard herrmann

dance sonia darbois, jonathan pranlas

light design éric wurtz
costume design laurence alquier
 

coproduction de hexe . maison de la danse de lyon
acknowledgments institut français de copenhague

restaging coproduction théâtre de la cité internationale - paris . théâtre garonne - toulouse . CCN de montpellier languedoc-roussillon
with the help of the conservatoire de strasbourg, cité de la musique et de la danse