Combat de Carnaval et Carême — Olivia Grandville — teaser

Teaser filmed by César Vayssié at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes in January 2016

“Combat de Carnaval et Carême is based on a writing process that I have been using for several years now, which involves initiating dance from concrete actions that, depending on how they are performed, their qualities, rhythms, spaces, and speed of sequence, take on a more or less narrative, expressionist, plastic, or abstract form.

Since dance is the movement that connects one posture to another, it is possible to write movement based on a corpus of borrowed gestures, whether they be everyday or work gestures, or more specific iconographies: pictorial, photographic, cinematographic, etc.

Movement unfolds between two forms, so it is simply a matter of organizing the sequence.

It was based on this idea that I created the project Foules: an audio score communicated via smartphones to a hundred amateurs who perform it in real time.

This experience allowed me to verify the richness of this compositional process and the uniqueness of the dance it produces, since memory does not intervene, leaving room for the immediacy of interpretation.

After this work, intended for amateurs, I wanted to repeat the experience with professional dancers, who are able to take ownership of the movement by instilling their own choreographic knowledge into it. This will be the Combat de Carnaval et Carême.”

Olivia Grandville

Acknowledgements: Sylvain Prunenec and Magali Caillet