Murmur - focus

In the course of the ECUMe* project Sylvie Robert met Anjara Rasamiarison, who was from Antananarivo and with whom she collaborated on the creation of Murmur. Through two cultures, Malgasy and Reunionese, the choreographer explores the notion of breath.

“This way of moving, this relationship with the ground, this internal bubbling, volcanic in fact, I have brought them into my consciousness, I have verbalised them”.

In the course of the ECUMe* project Sylvie Robert met Anjara Rasamiarison, who was from Antananarivo and with whom she collaborated on the creation of Murmur. Through two cultures, Malgasy and Reunionese, the choreographer explores the notion of breath until its annihilation.  

For the choreographer, the “materials of the body” converge into the notion of an internal bubbling, just like that of a volcano: this magma is the life breath of the earth. The urgency of survival in Madagascar is another breath of vitality, where the difficult living conditions differ from the European way of life seen in Reunion Island. A Malgasy ritual found in the highlands, that of the turning of the dead, permeates the choreography. It consists of digging up the bodies of the ancestors, adorning the grave in celebration, wrapping them in new shrouds, then conducting a reburial. 

Backed into their physical corners, the exhausted dancers draw on the lifting of their diaphragm generating a growing compression of their chest and shoulders. The jerky exhalation impacts the entire body, like the movement of contractions, spasms that weigh down the performers leaving them merely the vector of a powerful energy from the earth. 

The choreographer Sylvie Robert was part of the ECUMe project (Expérience Chorégraphique Ultra-Marine) in 2012, organised by the TEAT Cham Fleuri | TEAT Plein Air Departmental Theatres of Reunion Island. This project brought together eleven dancers from the Indian Ocean in a programme of exchanges with Yuval Pick, director of the National Choreographic Centre at Rillieux-la-Pape and the National Dance Centre.

Source : Lalanbik