twin paradox
world premiere 23th, 24th et 25th june, 2012 . théâtre de grammont .
festival montpellier danse 2012
I view the stage as a neutral space, as if without a homeland, that crafts its own coordinates, beyond the world’s geography and perhaps even more so, beyond time. And yet the stage is always there for real somehow, in real life, right at the edge of the real world, of the world’s rumble, at the edge of history and events.
It is in this near contradiction, this suspension matched by friction, that dance arises, with its own time-span, and thus stateless, bordering on the world, an infinite space-time that continues inexorably, and to which one must cling : continuing to dance whatever happens, even if the world comes crashing down.
The indeterminacy of the stage is where the essence of determination embeds itself : to be constantly pursued, as if dance were the last refuge against or before the elements, to be continued at all costs and in every which way, a kind of trajectory where dance becomes a pedestal, a weapon, even a manifesto but without asserting anything other than its own presence, or as one might dare say, its survival. To dance in spite of everything. To dance after everything.
The show will unfold as if one were watching a long infinite tracking shot, where the frame is the stage, and the landscape is the background. In a theatrical landscape that resembles a time-lined road, if there is anything left to do it’s the persistence of dance, not like a war but like a suspension.
The scenography is a flow that creates a constant out-of-shot. The stage is time passing by as well as the time of crossroads and transformation of dance. The stage is steeped, setting up natural atmospherics in a hazy location.
The dramaturgy takes shape though a writing system that wavers between fullness and emptiness, that unfurls dance in a continuum and creates climaxes. Writing systems will thus emerge in connection with notions of continuous flux, crescendo, the development of gesture-modules, and series.
My research for this project has several sources of inspiration, which will feed into the show more as work-tools than as visible forms, and thereby flesh out the stage’s specific timeframe, its dramaturgy, and this “insistence” of dance.
I started out by investigating American marathon dances of the 20s, not for their historical significance nor for their competitive/social usage, but as a way of exploring duration, that craze for incessant dancing, to the point where dance creates its own world and insists on itself, thus developing a particular dramaturgy of duration (diffraction, replay, loop, exhaustion etc.), beyond the limits of real time.
An ever-present motif throughout this material is the dance-a-deux, the duo, which will serve as a recurrent figure in my writing, not to illustrate folk or ballroom dancing but quite the contrary, to return to an archaic and essential structure of dance.
It is about inventing, at the fringes of the great human community, lovers, first form of community. By this I mean the duo, that clings on to one another in order to carry on, to advance, to perform, to survive, as well as the duo that transforms, that helps one another, that dances. The duo as a primary entity of dance, like a primary rhythmic chord or unit.
mathilde monnier
choreography mathilde monnier
music luc ferrari
stage design annie tolleter
light design éric wurtz
sound realization olivier renouf
costume design laurence alquier
dance cédric andrieux, marion ballester, julia cima, sonia darbois, guillaume guilherme (with sylvain cassou alternately), jung-ae kim, thibault lac, i-fang lin, felix mathias ott, jonathan pranlas
coproduction festival montpellier danse 2012 . théâtre de la ville - paris . triennale de la ruhr 2012 - 2014 . charleroi danses centre chorégraphique de la fédération wallonie bruxelles . centre chorégraphique national de montpellier languedoc-roussillon
Presse
Direct Montpellier plus - 25/06/2012
