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François Chaignaud – Petites joueuses

November 4th – 16th, 2024 Musée du Louvre, Paris
Non-stop from 7:30pm to 11:30pm

An Immersive Journey to the Medieval Louvre

©2024 Musée du Louvre : Florence Brochoire

With Petites joueuses, the dancer and choreographer François Chaignaud takes us on an immersive and continuous journey through the Louvre Médiéval : mutant and resonating creatures take over its fortifications, and form a disturbing carnival of forms, songs and unreasonable, mischievous or untamed figures.

Little player : this pejorative term, synonym of cowardice and a lack of ambition, has been appropriated by choreographer François Chaignaud in order to subvert its meanings, like a manifesto : to assert, through singularity, insolence and the lightness of bodies, a different way of occupying space, while blurring the semantic field of greatness attached to the consecrated place of Art. Little players performing continuously in the ‘Grand Louvre’, inventing their own rules, thwarting codes, introducing trouble, play, equivocation – deflating the authoritative effects of this huge exhibition machine. Taking the Louvre by the back, this community of performers reveals the archaeological layers of the medieval Louvre; one by one, each visitor discovers its foundations, its moats, its hidden strata, gaining access to a living organism, exhaling, rustling, populated by serious or comical figures. Like a prologue to the exhibition Figure du Fou, which explores the subversive value of the insane in medieval society, Petites joueuses acts as a counterpoint, a singing nave – a hullabaloo of voices, sounds and attitudes, affirming the centrality of the margin.

Text written by Gilles Amalvi for the 2024 edition of the Festival d’Automne

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Aakash Odedra & Lewis Major – Little Murmur

October 30th – November 2nd, 2024 Bristol Old Vic, Bristol
November 13th, 2024 Jumped Up Theatre, Peterborough
January 10th – 19th, 2025 The New Victory Theater, New York
35 minutes

A Portrait of Growing up with Dyslexia

© Aakash Odedra Company

Aakash Odedra Company, Lewis Major Projects and The Spark Arts for Children present Little Murmur by Aakash Odedra. A new dance theatre show for everyone age 7+, families and schools.

Diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age, Aakash found school very challenging. Defined by his learning difficulties, not his abilities, dance became his mode of expression. Combining visual design and technology with dance and humour, Little Murmur explores the warped and exaggerated realities of living in a world you struggle to process. Little Murmur is a stunning visual treat for young audiences and their families. Based on Aakash Odedra’s hugely moving show Murmur, this is an honest and heart felt conversation about the trials and tribulations of living with dyslexia. Watch bodies and words fly like flocks of birds, a murmuration, a little murmur.

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Pierre Piton – Open/Closed

October 30th, 2024 Fabbrica del Vapore/DiDstudio, Milan
55 minutes

Inside-Out & Outside-In

© Gregory Batardon

Born in 1995, Pierre Piton belongs to a generation that, according to him, is that of an in-between, that of a dystopian utopia. Between anger and fear, the beings of this generation navigate in an impossible future. With Open/Closed, Pierre Piton tries to externalize this duality in order to give the disorder a new strength.

Open/Closed guides the viewer through an intimate research exposing the body ‘inside-out and outside-in’. Imbued with organic sounds, this intimate and conceptual choreographic exploration plays on the ambiguity between intensity and vulnerability of a personal revolution that is as fragile as it is powerful. The boundaries of the self vanish in favor of an experience where the body coincides with that of the other, and is defined in a continuum linking past and future bodies.

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Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company – Still/Here

October 30th – November 2nd, 2024 BAM, Brooklyn
118 minutes with one intermission

Still/Here after 30 Years

© Joanne Savio

30 years after its premiere, the groundbreaking dance theater work Still/Here by Bill T. Jones returns to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. In its 42nd season, The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company remounts this timeless “landmark of 20th-century dance”, underscoring its ongoing resonance with today and its ability to evoke a spirit of survival. Created during one of the most contentious and terrifying periods, the AIDS epidemic, Still/Here broke boundaries between the personal and the political and exemplified a form of dance theater that is uniquely American. In spite of its being at the center of the culture wars, or because of it, the highly formal multimedia work defined and ultimately transcended its era. In the intervening years, much has changed in the world. Though with another Pandemic behind us, wars raging, the planet failing, and technology rising, somehow the questions around mortality remain. 

The  highly formal structures of Still/Here are delivered with simplicity and sophistication, marked by spoken text, video portraits, dance and the abstract nature of gesture. Gretchen Bender’s visual concept and multimedia environment is joined by music from Kenneth Frazelle (sung by Odetta) and Vernon Reid. Long-time collaborators include Liz Prince (costumes) and Robert Wierzel (lighting). 
At the heart of Still/Here are the “Survival Workshops: Talking and Moving about Life and Death.”  These workshops were conducted across the country with people living with life-threatening illness. The participants living on the front lines of the struggle to understand our mortality are in possession of information – info possible of being a gift and a burden. The participants’ generosity of spirit and willingness to express their experience both with words and gestures was both inspiring and difficult. They are the essence of Still/Here: their gestures inform the choreography, their words the lyrics, their images the stage. They will always be Still/Here. This work is dedicated to them.

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Sonya Lindfors – ONE DROP

October 25th-26th, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
110 minutes

A Stage Awakening the Ghosts

© Tuukka Ervasti

ONE DROP is a speculative summoning, a decolonial dream, an autopsy of the Western stage and an operetta. Slipping in meanings, leaking through different categories the work dives into the poetics and politics of relations, creating a stage that awakens the ghosts, connections lost or forgotten.

The title of the work refers to two separate frameworks, the one drop rhythm which is a reggae style drum beat as well as to the one drop rule of the Race Separation Act, created in the United States in the early 1900s, according to which a single drop of “Black blood” made a person “Black” despite their appearance. Through its multiple starting points the work interrogates the ghosts of the Western stage and its entanglements and relationalities to capitalism, coloniality and modernity.

ONE DROP continues Lindfors’ series of works dealing with power, representation and Black body politics.

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Benoît Nieto Duran – AILLEURS

October 24th – 26th, 2024 Les Brigittines, Brussels
November 8th, 2024 Centre Culturel de Huy, Huy
50 minutes

The Elsewhere of Oneself

© Mas­si­m­il­iano Arnone

With his first solo, Protéiforme, Benoît Nieto Duran pushed the demanding boundaries of breakdance and hip-hop movements to create a new style.

Today, as part of a duo, he is continuing this exploration by tackling the notion of ‘elsewhere’: the elsewhere of oneself, the elsewhere that is the other. Here we are dealing with the aesthetics of ‘distortion’ that allows us to see the absurdity of our everyday gestures. Starting from the imitation of the dancers, Benoît Nieto Duran creates a new choreography. In his pursuit of a free and ideal language, this creation, straddling depth and dynamism, presents another exploration of movement. Surprising to say the least.

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Sankai Juku – Utsushi

October 24th – 25th, 2024 Zorlu PSM Turkcell Sahnesi, Istanbul
70 minutes

Tribute to Ushio Amagatsu

© Elian Bachini

The legendary choreographer Ushio Amagatsu who introduced Europe to butoh nearly 45 years ago, has since championed this very special Japanese dance form and built a solid fan base worldwide. While he passed away this March, his much-celebrated company Sankai Juku will be making their Turkey debut at the festival with Utsushi.

Created at the special request of international festivals willing to present Sankai Juku in various features, Utsushi is composed of excerpts from the repertory of the company, reworked and restaged by Amagatsu in order to constitute a work of its own as the quintessence of his art from the last 45 years.

As Raimund Hoghe puts it: ‘Utsushi is much more than a compilation. Ushio Amagatsu creates a breath-taking dialogue between the beauty of his work and the beauty of nature, the sounds of nature and the composed music, the dance and the wind, the floor and the sky, the stars over our heads and the fire in front of us. With Utsushi, Amagatsu opens a new door – and we can see and feel the beauty of life.’

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Wim Vandekeybus – VOID

October 23rd – 31st, 2024 KVS, Brussels
November 8th – 9th, 2024 Pumpenhaus, Münster
December 18th, 2024 CCHA, Hasselt
January 16th, 2025 Teatro Bonci, Cesena
January 18th, 2025 Teatro Storchi, Modena
January 31st, 2025 Cultuurcentrum De Schakel, Waregem
Feburary 27th, 2025 Cultuurcentrum Brugge, Bruges
March 15th, 2025 Posthof, Linz
60 minutes

The Unstoppable Ultima Vez

© Danny Willems

In this new creation, Vandekeybus embraces the void – even more so – he seeks it out. He starts anew, goes back to square one, taking the simple emptiness as a starting point to arrive at a new form of awareness. He not only seeks to feel existence, life, in a different way, but also aims to add a new way of valuing the performance. By looking differently, within complete simplicity.

“Enlarging by emptying” sounds contradictory but works in a simple way: an empty room seems bigger than a full one. True essence demands throwing off all ballast. An emptiness filled with elusive dignity. Bodies attracting each other like minerals and magnets. Movement as expression of the deepest inner state… An emptiness that offers countless possibilities to be filled…

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Xie Xin / Imre & Marne van Opstal – Broken Bob

October 18th/25th, November 9th/16th/21st, December 22nd, 2024 Staatstheater Darmstadt, Darmstadt
70 minutes

A Double Bill Creation for Hessisches Staatsballett

© Andreas Etter

After the successful productions Timeless by Xie Xin and I’m afraid to forget your smile by Imre & Marne van Opstal, which was nominated for the DER FAUST 2023 theater prize, the Hessisches Staatsballett combines the dance positions of these currently groundbreaking choreographers for the first time in a double evening in Broken Bob. The marble is created in the earth like the ashes after the fire. In a long transformation, under heat and pressure, its fine lines paint themselves into the stone; tell of the past like the black from the ravages of the flames. Traces decorate and they stick. Hidden deep in the layers of being and buried in the overlay of inner impressions, a broken sense of beauty appears.

Powerful and sublime. Rice paper, gunpowder and six bodies are the ingredients of Xie Xin’s new creation Broken Sense of Beauty. In the piece, the Chinese choreographer deals with a personal tragedy. When dance comes into play, it’s about movement. About movements and their structure. Does this exist outside of the movement that produces it? When structure comes into play, it’s about systems. About systems and their meaning. Does this lie outside of the system that generates it? When meaning comes into play, it’s about people. About people and about Bob. In their new creation I am Bob, Imre & Marne van Opstal explore the effects of patterns in dance. In close connection with music and text, the Dutch siblings create a large choreographic network of identity.

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Christian Rizzo – d’après une histoire vraie

October 12th – 13th, 2024 Kyoto Arts Theater Shunjuza, Kyoto
October 19th – 20th, 2024 Saitama Arts Theater, Saitama
November 7th – 9th, 2024 Le CENTQUATRE, Paris
November 12th – 13th, 2024 Bonlieu scène nationale, Annecy
November 23rd, 2024 Domaine de Bayssan, Béziers
November 26th – 27th, 2024 Scène Nationale d’ALBI-Tarn, Albi
60 minutes

The Revival of a Masterpiece

© Marc Domage

Wearing short-sleeved shirts and denim pants, and barefoot, eight men appear on a dimly lit stage and begin dancing in silent unison. Soon, two drummers join them. The dancers synchronize in pairs or groups, and then suddenly become one person who has left the group. The joining and dispersing, repetition and development are dizzyingly but tightly constructed, leaving no time to take your eyes off them. And even in the neat composition, their bodies are bubbling and heating up, and excitement is pulsating.

Christian Rizzo is a multi-talented leader in the European art scene, with a wide range of fields including not only performing arts but also visual arts, music, and fashion. The origins of this work, which premiered at the Avignon Theater Festival in 2013, date back to about 10 years earlier, when Rizzo witnessed a dance performed by male dancers in Istanbul and was deeply impressed by it. One dance inspires the birth of another dance over time. We witness a moment in the unbroken dance activity.

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