Asphalte

After responding to the commission for the 2009 season of the Suresnes Cités Danse festival, which meant presenting a 30-minute work after 25 days of rehearsal with five non-professional hip-hop dancers, Pierre Rigal decided to pursue this adventure beyond the festival. “Asphalte” is a piece staged for five hip-hop dancers, each specialising in a different technique: Break, Popping, New Style, Liquid and Krumping. Four boys and a girl. Pierre Rigal focuses on these techniques and uses them to direct the dancers towards his own choreographic world. The characters constantly travel around a three-dimensional block of light, a sort of variable and interactive monolith. As they perform in front of this abstract light, the dancers create urban silhouettes which evolve as they pass. They move through absurd situations of violence, humour, war and poetry. They gradually transform, losing their humanity, their organic quality, to become robots. By using a particular posture, choreography or clothing, thanks to the different mobile lights that they display, the silhouettes slowly metaporphose into monstrous and ghostly creatures, disquieting but funny at the same time. The graphic universe is that of a city which might have been created by comics and science fiction, a multi-media and cinematographic world. The calm of this imaginary city is disturbed by an abstract and insidious violence, by a war which does not really give its name. This war is painful, of course, but is also full of humour and joy. It is this which dictates the evolution of the characters, who progressively abandon their humanity and are gradually eaten away from within by mysterious, autonomous living entities. Finally, at the height of the conflicts, commotion and blows, the bodies of the characters are thrown into the air and finish hurled to the ground, inert. On the icy asphalt of this imaginary city.
In this piece, Pierre Rigal is interested in the impact of contexts, environments and cultures on the human body. By linking choreography with graphics, the link between humanity and its organisation becomes the real issue. Pierre Rigal attempts to define what of their true humanity individuals are obliged to abandon progressively in the face of their context. The result is both sad and funny.


Sources : Maison de la Danse programmingCredits


Choreography Pierre Rigal
Dance performed Compagnie dernière minuteConception, chorégraphie, lumières Pierre Rigal interprétation Mathieu Hernandez, Hervé Kanda, Yoann Nirennold, Camille Regneault, Julien Saint-Maximin assistante artistique, costumes Mélanie Chartreux constructeur décor, lumières Frédéric Stoll musique Julien Lepreux régie lumières Gisèle Pape
Commande et production Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar-Suresnes Cités danse 2009, créée le 10 janvier 2009.
Coproduction cie dernière minute, Suresnes Cités danse 2009 et TGP – CDN de Saint-Denis et Le Parvis – scène nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées avec le soutien du Théâtre Garonne à Toulouse, de la DRAC Midi-Pyrénées, de la Région Midi-Pyrénées et la Ville de Toulouse.

La compagnie dernière minute reçoit le soutien de la Fondation BNP Paribas pour le développement de ses projets.

Réalisation vidéo Charles Picq date du document vidéo 2009 production Maison de la DanseDurée de l’œuvre 50 min