100 mots pour une danse
Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau have extended their research on the relationships between movements and words by activating their possible correspondences, shifts, divergences and echoes. Little by little during the course of the work, verbal eloquence moved through the body. Henceforth, the latter insists and becomes the essential frame of the show.
A few words about the process
The words that named dances, figures, singularities, relationships to time and space have disappeared. The dancers are invested with an energy that pushes them forward, always further; the forms become disrupted and blurred.
Different eras mingle, it is then the incidental encounter of Lady Macbeth and Petrouchka, or that of a curve and a crown. Creatures pop up again and again, it’s like a night race, a dream.
The round is launched. This childhood dance calls upon memories and the remembrance of ancient movements… Everyone can interpret these flashes that arise from the circle as signs. 100 words are with us on set and we can’t hear them; perhaps we can see them or more precisely recognise them. They stubbornly speak to us about the show, about dance, about bodies alive or absent, about travesty and illusion, about light and darkness.
The show appeals to our imagination; it plays with black and white, like writing on the page, shadow and clarity. This piece deciphers language by means of the body and multiplies the movement in a cluster of evocations. “100 words for a dance” moves the art of writing towards a very physical escapement in what the dance wears of unique (even if it means talking about it and talking about it again). The book has become a score to be diverted and reinvested beyond words.
Conception: Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau.
With: Nadia Alsati, Geisha Fontaine et Julie Galopin.
Production and support: Région Ile-de-France, Conseil départemental du Val-de-Marne, Ville de Champigny-sur-Marne, Le 6b (Saint-Denis) – other ongoing partnerships.
Residencies and provision of studios: La Briqueterie CDCN – Vitry-sur-Seine, micadanses – Paris, CND – Pantin, L’Orange bleue – Ville d’Eaubonne, Théâtre Gérard Philipe – Champigny-sur-Marne, Théâtre Jean Vilar – L’Île-Saint-Denis – other residencies in progress.