Categories
Archive

Javier Martín – Figuras del Umbral

November 14th – 15th, 2024 Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
70 minutes

Science, Philosophy and Choreography

© Leo López

A piece that invites us to reflect and review the speed of our era, installed in our bodies and fragmenting our attention. Javier Martín invokes the concept of ancestral rituals of “crossing the threshold”, involving the body in a social dance. In the words of the artist: “The famous ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ archetype refers to those figures that take on the forms of our most intimate fears: they guard the threshold, not to deny us entry, but to encourage us to explore the propitious labyrinth that facilitates transformation and, therefore, passage.”

Javier Martín, a choreographer with a scientific background and passion for philosophy, is developing an epistemological and critical research project about the art of movement. He takes a transdisciplinary approach to choreographic creation and dance, drawing on writing, performative conferences, research groups and creative laboratory and tool development. Since starting out in 2005, he has created and showcased more than 30 productions in Spain, France, Russia, Portugal, Ukraine, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Uruguay, with fifteen stage shows and an equal number of site-specific projects and special collaborations.

Categories
Archive

Farooq Chaudhry – Ten Thousand Tons of Moonlight

November 15th – 17th, 2024 Young Theatre, Shanghai
Duration: unknown

When Poetry Meets Dance

© Oliver Hoo

Ten Thousand Tons of Moonlight is a compelling dance-theatre production that draws inspiration from the thought-provoking poems of Yu Xiuhua, a female celebrated contemporary Chinese poet. The production brings to life Yu Xiuhua’s reflections and questions on love, beauty, disability, and the societal expectations placed on women.

Conceived and directed by Farooq Chaudhry, Ten Thousand Tons of Moonlight, merges the languages of poetry, dance and visual design to explore the dualities and contradictions that inhabit Yu Xiuhua and all of us. The performance raises questions about the role of personal struggles in finding our authenticity. It asks whether stepping out of the shadows and embracing our true selves is the key to finding liberation, or if these shadows hold a deeper meaning? Could these poems, serve as a doorway to an alternate reality where our essence can flourish and our souls can find freedom?

Categories
Archive

Maria Clara Villa Lobos – Pedros

November 20th – 23rd, 2024 Théâtre de Liège, Liège
50 minutes

When a Father and His Son Are both Dancers

© Davide Zazzera

Their names are Francis and Antoine Pedros. They are father and son, and both professional dancers. Francis was soloist in the Ballet Royal de Wallonie, which later became Charleroi Danse, Antoine is a dancer and choreographer for his own company.

With this duet, Maria Clara explores the father-son relationship through the language of dance which they have in common, but also through words, memories and anecdotes…

Categories
Archive

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.

Categories
Archive

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.

Categories
Archive

TAO Dance Theater – 13 & 14

October 12th, 2024 Theater Bonn Opera House, Bonn
October 16th-19th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
October 25th-26th, 2024 Teatro Central, Seville
October 30th, 2024 Teatro Ariosto, Reggio Emilia
November 5th-6th, 2024 International Theater Amsterdam, Amsterdam
November 13th, 2024 Le théâtre de Saint-Nazaire, Saint-Nazaire
November 15th-16th, 2024 Théâtre de Cornouaille, Quimper

November 21st, 2024 Le Quartz, Brest
75 minutes incl. intermission

Winners of Silver Lion, BIENNALE DANZA 2023

© Duan Ni

TAO Dance Theater is a Chinese dance company based in Beijing. Founded in 2008 by the choreographers Tao Ye, Duan Ni and by the producer Wang Hao, the company has an innovative approach to movement, a body technique known as “Circular Movement System”. At its roots is the idea of pure dance, achieved through the “ritualistic repetition of the body’s natural movements”, invoking the spectators’ capacity to concentrate on the essential nature of the repeated gesture, devoid of any ornament.

TAO Dance Theatre’s choreographic Series of Numbers began in 2008 and has been invited onto the most important stages of the world, from the Lincoln Center Art Festival of New York to Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, as well as the Sydney Opera House and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Its minimalist aesthetic further codified Tao Ye and Duan Ni’s method, achieving an exasperated repetition that seeks truth in the body.

13 and 14 explore different themes, respectively involving 13 and 14 dancers on stage following the habitual pattern of the series. 13 develops along a three-part scheme, exploring three different ways that bodies relate: in the solo, the duet, the ensemble. Starting from the unity of the ensemble, the choreographer progressively fragments the dancers into different formations between ralenti and sudden accelerationsreflecting the “complexity of the physical world, where one is continuously colliding, coming together and apart, falling and bouncing back” within a choreographic form that is both rigorous and open.

A study of rhythm, 14 relies on rapid changes of movement that bring out the full range of possibilities between stasis and movement. As the result of a complex dynamism, 14 takes the vocabulary of the “Circular Movement System” to the extreme: Points, lines and planes that intersect in space bring the work back to pure movement, deploying the full range of possibilities”.

Categories
Archive

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

Categories
Archive

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.

Categories
Archive

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.’

Categories
Archive

Hiroaki Umeda – assimilating

October 4th-5th, 2024 Le Cube Garge, Garges-lès-Gonesse
October 8th, 2024 Théâtre Hexagone, Meylan
90 minutes (double bill with split flow)

A Behavior Designer

© Hiroaki Umeda

Choreographer, dancer, and visual artist from Tokyo. After studying photography, he broadened his interest in physical expression and independently pursued cross-disciplinary dance art, incorporating visual art and digital expression without the shackles of any specific method. He began presenting works in 2000, and the piece “while going to a condition” received international acclaim. Since then, he has performed as well as created installations focusing on human physical senses in more than 150 cities throughout 40 countries, including France. Also involved in sound, video, and lighting design, Umeda’s work is highly acclaimed in the context of visual art for his methods of combining original movement and digital technology.

His latest solo assimilating expands the concept of dance and treating the human body and its environment as “one nature” in his choreography, with back and forth between the projected images and the artist’s body. Umeda is responsible for the design of movement, sound, and visuals as well as programming.

auto undefined