A cherub snuggles behind a planter. The mine rather admiring. There is something. Rather than leaving the companies it accompanies to fight alone in the jungle of Avignon, the Tremblay-en-France theater has taken matters into its own hands and is investing the courtyard of La Parenthèse to defend them all. The unique project is called La Belle Scène Saint Denis. Programmers and spectators just have to sit down and let themselves go. The young people of the theater association tow, broadcast, act as volunteers. The companies share the bill for an hour and a half, morning and evening. And the show flies high.
These days and until July 20, at 10 a.m., Olga Dukhovnaya opens the ball. A solo inspired by folk dances: jumping steps, striking, one foot to the other and the upper body which in turn throws itself contaminated by the momentum of the dance. The body lets itself be haunted by the music of the accordion, accompanies it like a percussive instrument, sinks into it for a rest, then resumes its vertical position, a laser that shears space, jostles it, expands when he dances on his knees.
Luca and Pedro continue. Paulo Azevado, anthropologist, writer and choreographer, chose them from their underprivileged neighborhoods in Brazil to support a reflection on communication. Their dance is furious. A confrontation. A refusal to listen to the other: each gesture takes on the challenge of one-upmanship. Or tries to silence the other, cutting his way. Bounce, fall, anger, despair: the body can be virtuosically obtuse. Fatigue brings a flow of sweetness on Schubert’s Ave Maria. But, God, what to do with that tenderness?
Sylvain Riéjou closes the triptych with Je badine avec l’amour, a choreographic comedy announced in three acts and of which we only see one. The choreographer is embarking on a remake of Dirty Dancing, a piece which has haunted him since childhood and which decided his vocation as a dancer. He questions the art of the love duet, contemporary dance, the link between the choreographer and the dancer, the sensuality of the foot that lands on the ground. An exercise full of finesse and ideas. We don’t know how the two acts that remain to be written will be, and that we will discover in November, but the first act is truly hilarious.
Switzerland’s Maud Blandel is also in the city of the Popes until July 22. She presents her selection in the in and the off, in various places in the city. In the cloister of the Chartreuse cemetery in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, Maud Blandel gave L’œil nu. Six dancers play petanque with soft boules. They roll to cartoon music and draw the rectangle of the field on the ground. The dancers approaching them to discuss the blow, outline a circle which will remain their formation throughout the show. Launched like a constellation around one of their own, they move on the plateau around which the spectators are seated on three sides. They linger in the corners, flowing in a spiral, folded, unfolded, and through which the movement wrinkles, reverses, spreads, dissolves from one to the other.
The dancers dance in a kind of abandon, precise but loose gestures, supple, fluid, repetitive. Under the stars, these whirlwinds embrace the great cosmic currents and the soundtrack which, going from cartoon to classical or electro, crosses the dancers with well-defined emotional colors. In the program Maud Blandel explains that she tries to make peace, in this room, with the suicide of her father. Nothing explicit refers to it except the palpable sensitivity of this dance which represents obsession and the way in which one escapes from it little by little by regaining footing, in oneself or with others, by soliciting areas where pain is not. This search for the most subtle of dance is dazzling.
Olga Dukhovnaya will be on May 25, 2024 at Tremblay-en-France for a new creation. Paulo Azevedo on November 21 in Sarzeau, then on tour in Brazil. Sylvain Riéjou will present Je badine avec l’amour (because all men are so imperfect and so dreadful) on November 23 and 24 in Romainville, January 19 and 20 in Nantes, February 12 and 13 at the Carreau du Temple in Paris, 14 February in Rennes. Maud Blandel will be from September 1 to 4 at La Bâtie, Geneva festival, from November 16 to 18 at the CND in Pantin, on January 30 at the CNDC in Angers, on February 3, 2024 at the Parallèle 14 festival in Marseille.
