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Jan Martens – VOICE NOISE

September 24th – 28th, 2024 charleroi danse / la raffinerie, Brussels
October 12th – 13th, 2024 Teatro Argentina, Rome
October 17th – 19th, 2024 mercat de les flors, Barcelona
November 6th, 2024 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
November 19th – 23th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
December 11th, 2024 Concertgebouw Brugge, Brugge
December 14th, 2024 Leietheater, Deinze

90 minutes

The Gender of Sound

© Phile Deprez

On a selection of thirteen tracks by women, his dance spares us the illustration. Instead, it acts as a filter to enhance our listening experience.

Léa Poiré

‘Redundant.’ Or more bluntly: ‘Irritating noise.’ This is how the voice of the woman has often been considered from ancient Greek times to today.

VOICE NOISE is inspired by Anne Carson’s essay ‘The Gender of Sound’ (1992), in which she exposes how patriarchal culture has sought to silence women by ideologically associating women’s sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

In VOICE NOISE, some innovative, unknown and/or forgotten women’s voices from the past hundred years of music history are given a stage. By doing so, Jan Martens takes another step in his efforts to shape an alternative canon.

Six dancers respond to recordings in which the human voice can be heard in various guises: humming, soothing, shrieking, whispering, singing. Gradually, they discover their own voice.

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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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Christos Papadopoulos – Ties Unseen

September 26th – October 2nd, 2024 Amare, The Hague
October 4th, 2024 Chassé Theater, Breda
October 8th – 10th, 2024 Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Amsterdam

October 12th, 2024 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
October 23rd – 26th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
November 6th – 9th, 2024 Megaron, Athens
November 28th – December 1st, 2024 Amare, The Hague
35 minutes

Part of NDT 1 double-bill or triple-bille program.

A Minimalist NDT

© Nederlands Dans Theater

Christos Papadopoulos’ new work explores our subtle, everyday social connections, revealing the beauty within the most profound connections that often go unnoticed. Drawing from the unadorned fabric of the human experience, the choreographer illustrates the simplicity of shared moments: the unspoken understanding between friends, silent nods of solidarity among strangers, and the quiet resilience threaded through collective struggles.

A new voice for NDT, the Greek-born choreographer favours a minimalist and precise language of movement. Through small gestures that belie an intense physicality, Papadopoulos has created an ode to the power of invisible forces and transports the audience to a mysterious space in which there is neither beginning nor end.

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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”.

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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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Myriam Gourfink – Rêche

September 25th – 28th, 2024 Panthéon, Paris
60 minutes

World Premiere in Panthéon

© Laurent Paillier

At first, the goal is to present a thick, dense, and fibrous substance by choreographing a clustering of bodies. The dancers, spread horizontally, glide on the floor and over each other. Then, to make visible the moment when, after being pressed against each other, they detach, much like their internal bodily masses gradually engage in opposite directions. They start to move apart, to differentiate, moving in opposite directions while still constantly linked. Their dance mostly unfolds on the ground. The group’s tightening and expansions allow its movement: each contraction followed by an expansion into a new space. Together, they shape pneumatic volumes, making them palpable. They unfold with determination and gentleness through the notions of direct space (moving from one point to another by the shortest path), sustained time, and lightness of weight.

Finally, the group develops a more vaporous material: the treatment of space, which was direct in the previous phase, becomes indirect (movement from one point to another is curved and sinuous). A floating quality, conducive to resonance, sets in. The seven dancers are always in contact; the group moves and changes shape, but now, it remains expansive, and the dancers invest both horizontal and vertical space. Together, they float, they wander through the meanders of a labyrinth (each one’s inner bodily space and the group’s space). Inhabited by the light and elastic roundness of sacro-cranial vibrations, their volume encompasses the labyrinth; they move through its passages, savoring the thickness of each moment, the eternity of dilated time.