The project consists in filming that sequence, a “choreographical ritornello”, for as long as I can dance it.
G. Fontaine.
Millibar is an evolutive choreographical movie, for which the idea was born in 1998.
It is filming a same dance sequence at least once a year, outside, in different places. The dance sequence is interpreted by the dancer and choreographer Geisha Fontaine, and lasts for about forty seconds. It is filmed with a Super 8 camera by the filmmaker Pierre Cottreau.
The shots are then selected, transferred in videos and cut to constitute a short choreographical movie.
This project could be a sort of tour as it is about performing the same proposition in different moments and places. But it is not; because of the dance’s duration, its interpretation in public places without programming it before and its recording on film (which usually implies several takes).
The repetition of the same sequence becomes the occasion of a bigger attention to what is around the dancer. The presence and the attitude of those who watch her influence her interpretation. She has to pay attention to others, sometimes one metre away from her and sometimes to bikes, cars and other vehicules. She focuses on the quality of the movements, but also on the place’s atmosphere : people, light, sounds, architecture, landscape, etc.
If the sequence remains the same, the context changes every time : very busy streets of Madras or Cairo, deserted construction site in Beirut, public garden of Figueres, crossroad of Vanves, emptiness of Kyoto, crowd of Tokyo, etc. The seasons also change. With this short film, the spectator watches many times the same little dance, in places more or less exotic, with witnesses that are always different.
Watching Millibar, is also watching the spectators of the dance.
This project has been motivated by the curiosity of what a little dance would become over the years.
It is a game with the image as a dance souvenir and as a trip souvenir. It is about crossing the souvenir of a unique moment and the insistance of a dance moment, aimed at being performed again until the very last limit : the body incapable of dancing.
The choreographical ritornello is something stubborn in time, an irreversible.
Man is an irreversible in bones and flesh ! Man is an irreversible embodied.
Vladimir Jankélévitch – L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie.
