La danse du temps

“The perception of time was the centre of my considerations. Three threads weave the web, each lending its own colour: the music of the composer Tôn-Thât Tiêt, the work of the sculptor Andy Goldworthy and my own dance.”

For this choreographic project, created at the dawning of the third millennium and inspired by this symbolic passage, the perception of time was the centre of my considerations. Three threads weave the web, each lending its own colour: the music of the composer Tôn-Thât Tiêt, the work of the sculptor Andy Goldworthy and my own dance.

A commonly-held image is incorporated in our approaches – the river.  
It took Tôn-Thât Tiêt back to Vietnam, to the Perfume River and the boatmen’s songs of his childhood.   
It inspired Andy Goldworthy to create the silt river stage-set for the show.    
It led me through its play with calm and turbulent currents that are forever being renewed.

I invited the choreographers, Françoise and Dominique Dupuy, along with Sophie Lessard, to join the Ballet Atlantique for this project, to question generations and relationships, and to emphasize just how much the simple dance that I love requires exceptional performers. Their experience, their workshop work that they would share with us, their presence on the stage, were fundamental contributions to my reflection on the perception of a dancer’s time, on the way a dancer’s body crosses and is crossed by time. The tools I used in La Danse du Temps (The Dance of Time) are clear. Walking, running, jumping, falling, trances and immobility, creating a generous dance, a primal dance; a piece of work focusing on rhythm and the cross-over from one aspect to another.

As a choreographer today, I am deeply interested in finding out how we can cross over from a frenzied dance to total immobility, without dying. In discovering how a dancer’s body can portray the kind of dilation that exists between real time and the experience of the show. It means transporting the public into another perception of time, until they reach a point, a whirling sensation, where they no longer know whether what they have just seen has lasted three hours or only a second. I am fascinated by this “loss of time”.

Source : Régine Chopinot