À Contre Danse

Now let’s be clear, this evening you will not see any country dancing: “À Contre Danse” is a piece drawn from life, experience and memory. How do the body and mind, after a specific study by means of the contredanse, digest and reapply the material learned? To move beyond his life in dance, his experience as a dancer and the substrate of the creations of older choreographers, after a number of pieces, Davy Brun felt the need to go back to the origins of classical dance. The popular country dance, known in England since the sixteenth century, arrived in France at the end of the seventeenth century. The French version, the contredanse (etymologically “to dance facing one another”) gave birth to a standardised form: the quadrille. It belongs to a world of codes which require a mediation of the feelings. Access to the other needs to obey a set of strict symbolic rules. The composition of the piece is based on preparatory work with Cathy Flahaut: “a square space, a multiplied vision of displacements in pairs or in unison, the figures described become entangled, the paths mingle, untie themselves, and like in a kaleidoscope, the movement organises itself and creates its motifs.” What can one do with this dance today? How should it be treated? What should be kept? What is the point of developing it or reviving it? It is worth noting that if this was a performance dance in which a society presented itself to itself, then it ignored the frontal rapport between the performer and audience. Davy Brun: “I then felt a greater need to foster that which I had not found in this dance: using the arms, jumps and also physical contact, in short, everything that was not allowed. It was important for me, rather than trying to reconstruct or re-transcribe the dance, to build our work on this premise. What part of the past and what traces of it do we still hold within us? Can we (or how can we) rid ourselves of the past and/or our experience? In what form do the influences appear?”

The music accompanies this evolution of the piece into a contemporary world while quoting Handel directly. It presents a collage in which the music of the eighteenth century is blended with sound layers and the musical creation of Julien Tarride.
Two dummies are used as stage props. They are a reference to the quadrille’s past; they also allow the face-to-face character, the basis of the quadrille, to be maintained in the stage composition. But anchored in the present, their charisma renews the eternal question by default: how do I reach the other, up to what point should I signal my conscious and incarnate presence? This device then allows the two dancers to find their focus of exploration in an endless succession of lifts and entwining of bodies… a reconsideration of the space necessary for a relationship. The void which shapes the contours of a relationship gives way to a tamed sense of shock.

Source : Maison de la Danse