soapéra
mathilde monnier & dominique figarella
world premiere from 4 to 6 of july, 2010 . festival montpellier danse
"The first encounter with Dominique Figarella will revolve around his artwork. My discovery of his work was a potent eye-opener, igniting my curiosity about painting. The relationship between dance and painting is rooted in a long tradition, where painting enters the realm of dance and performance by way of stage backdrops.
The canvas creates a vertical space that displays the artwork, while also functioning as decor. For this show, we wish to invert the process, i.e. to start out in the lab, which will serve both as rehearsal room and art studio. We shall mingle our respective disciplines to create a theater space that will ensue from the painting-in-progress. The choreographic work will derive from the artwork, altering it as well as shaping it.
We shall thus present the audience with a two-way situation. This creative venture will resist resorting to an outer theme. Rather, our aim is to dialogue and enact a readable work process that can comprise a self-contained performance. The question that arises is as follows: does dance without a subject become abstract?
This is not about locating ourselves within a specific current, nor about investigating the role of abstraction in dance (even Cunningham said that his work was not abstract). It is about asserting that the theme is the practice. The building blocks of this project will be the materials themselves, whether paints and brushes, or texts, tracks and gestures." m. monnier
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"We shall create a joint show by interweaving our respective practices. The starting point will be the activity of reciprocal translation, which will interpret whatever occurs on the pictorial surface onstage, and then explore how to transform these unfolding layers into the temporal modes of scenographic writing and dramaturgy.
These exercises in translation will focus on three topics:
the stage, the canvas: a joint blueprint
An outline is invisibly grafted onto a surface, be it on the ground or on a wall. By randomly outlining a neutral space and thereby setting up a frame, this blueprint highlights the actions that take place within its boundaries, distinguishing them from whatever happens out-of-frame. This delineated space will be our shared creative terrain.
the theater, the gallery: a joint showcase
A dark room, a stage and an audience are all it takes to convert an event, even a mere light bulb plummeting from the ceiling, into the crux of a drama or the trigger of a plot that compellingly steers all subsequent events and actions.
Similarly, an empty space with white walls is all it takes to make the audience see the red fire extinguisher that has been propped there like an anonymous oeuvre. Before yielding dance or visual art, our practices will primarily be applied to this showcase.
a series of moments, a layered snapshot: a shared dialectical timeframe
Scenographic writing involves a sequence of moments that arise and unfold within a timeframe onstage. Each subsequent moment is an action that hinges on the memory of what precedes it, so that each ensuing gesture, whether repeated or altered, represents the prior timeframe, although without divulging its details. In a similar vein, a painting conveys in a single image the multiple procedures that have spawned its layers, like a transparent mille-feuille. It thus reveals, in a single instant of perception, the complete and detailed archives of its genesis.
We shall both pursue this approach in order to set up a memory-layering of the acts that have been performed within a specific experience. These memories will fuel our common pool of raw material.
Together, we shall flesh out the above three notions, proceeding from the hypothesis that they can be enacted onstage.
We shall explore their possible permutations, testing them out through the prism of our respective practices. Hypothesis and experimentation will be the springboard for our research, which will be nourished by our input. We are eager to get down to work." d. figarella
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conception mathilde monnier & dominique figarella
choreography mathilde monnier
visual art dominique figarella
dance yoann demichelis, julien gallée-ferré, thiago granato, i-fang lin
stage collaboration annie tolleter
sound olivier renouf
light design éric wurtz
costume realization laurence alquier
production
festival montpellier danse 2010 / centre pompidou - les spectacles vivants / festival d’automne - paris / künstlerhaus mousonturm frankfurt et tanzlabor_21 / centre chorégraphique national de montpellier languedoc-roussillon
dominique figarella’s piece realised in the frame of “la commande publique du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (direction générale de la création artistique/direction régionale des affaires culturelles du languedoc-roussillon.)
Presse
L'hérault du jour - 06/07/2010
Direct Montpellier Plus - 06/07/2010
