CÉDEZ LE PASSAGE - ÉPISODE 1 : Un homme qui dort - Hela Fattoumi et Eric Lamoureux

The series of danced documentaries-CEDEZ LE PASSAGE invites dancers-choreographers to invest in and question anti-homeless street furniture. We wish to offer a sensitive experimentation between dance and cinema to confront the body and the words of the dancers with « anti-body » furniture, now modestly called « dissuasive furniture ».

We combine our worlds, with a common thread, our respective views on the city and the place of the excluded for the production of these documentaries.

Nawel Oulad & Antonin Sgambato

The DANCED DOCUMENTARIES seek to make visible attempts by the body to appropriate a space that seems a priori impossible for dance: anti-homeless street furniture.

Several dancer-choreographers go in duet to meet these dissuasive urban furniture. They question these inhospitable architectures with their bodies and their voices.

Production : Pleine Image & Cie Nawel Oulad
Réalisateurs : Nawel Oulad & Antonin Sgambato

http://www.naweloulad.com

https://www.antonin-sgambato.com

https://www.pleineimage-loc.com

We sometimes help the excluded, the foreigner, the needy. He is treated in reception or accommodation centers. He is also locked up inside hospitals, prisons or detention centers. As long as the vagrant man hides himself under the folds of the city, we let it happen; but it is hardly tolerated when it comes to light.

The dance often proposes to take the bodies out of the established frameworks and limits. It seemed essential to us to call on dancer-choreographers to create filmed highlights of these anti-homeless street furniture.

Based on the observation that these concrete and steel structures force us to invent gestures in reaction, we ask the choreographers to offer – as space and time specialists – an expertise in these ergonomics of discomfort.

How to tame these surfaces? Is it possible that these dissuasive zones become subversive places? Can we sublimate them in meeting places? What do they say about our place and our role in society?

By risking stopping, touching, weight, suspension, contact with matter, the dancers deploy their bodies where they shouldn’t. These dancing bodies play with the constraints that the city imposes on us in terms of rhythm and time. By confronting these urbanities, they bring to light these architectures designed specifically against the body. A battle of territory takes place over a few square meters between the stiffness of the concrete and the plasticity of the dancers.

The interest of DANCED DOCUMENTARIES is also to film the dancers’ hesitations. Will they be able to fully move and offer a controlled choreography in the face of the pitfalls that these anti-homeless furniture hold out for them? Will their bodies not be prevented and hampered in their movements? How are they going to react?

The voice of artists is essential to understand at the same time as them their desires, their uncertainties, their frustrated emotions …

The dancers grope, stumble and bounce until they find a balance. The danced act resists the silent obstinacy of these architectures erected against the well-being of bodies and against any form of human gathering. These architectures become, during a dance, the unexpected place of an improvised scenography, a space for a moment embellished by the contortions and arabesques of the dancers. The bodies of the dancer-choreographers deploy their creativity and act in resistance to these sculptures of the impossible.