Density 21.5

This series showcasing the leading works of two creators was  initiated  last year at the CN D. After Monnier/Marin and  Mantero/Triozzi, Carlson  and Diverrès take pride of place this spring.  In their work, bodies  become calligraphies, emblems of a subterranean  world that is tragic and  mysterious. Their dance is all about women,  the movement of a body not  split up playing with gravity, the energy of  urges, expressiveness and a  certain violence of the emotions. They are  Carolyn Carlson and  Catherine Diverrès, two choreographers producing a  world of images and  energies that draw on other worlds and encounters.  Catherine Diverrès’s  career has been marked above all by her trip to  Japan to meet Kazuo Ôno,  one of the founding choreographers of butô  dancing. As for Carolyn  Carlson, she left Alwin Nikolaïs for France in  the early 1970s and has  influenced several generations of performers  and creators. In this  programme, the two choreographers bring to the  surface of their bodies,  not their memory, and still less a distant  past, but the vestige of what  was for them a foundational experience.  In Ô Sensei, Catherine  Diverrès, accompanied by Katja Fleig,  takes us back to the origins of  her calligraphy, in a dialogue with the  spirit of her (Sensei) master  Kazuo Ôno, who died in 2010. Imbued with  tiny variations and  incantations, throbbing with ambiguous  incarnations, her gestures sketch  out a farewell that is repeated  infinitely in the manner of unfolding  time. In Short Stories, Carolyn Carlson touches on the invisible. From her famous solo Density 21,5 – which revolutionised the dance world 42 years ago and was passed on to Isida Micani – to Mandala danced by Sara Orselli, Carlson conjures dreams out of the air. But the eternal Water Lady lends her intense presence to Immersion, plumbing the unfathomable depths of the soul.

Carolyn Carlson’s solos showcase her spiritual and existential  approach to dance. She describes them as ways of sharing the state of  solitude that is peculiar to the human  condition.

source : program of the CN D

Density 21.5, on a score by Edgar  Varese, changed the career of Carolyn Carlson (born in 1943). In 1973,  on tour in Hamburg with Alwin Nikolais’ company, she was noticed by Rolf  Liebermann, then director of the Hamburg Opera. He offered her to  create a work for a “Tribute to Varese” evening, at the place at the  Paris Opera. Carolyn Carlson accepted and created Density 21.5 on a platinum flute score from Varese. All Carlson is already in Density 21.5.  Long and flexible line broken by small jerky gestures of arms,  verticality and spiral… Carlson’s typical vibration radiates this  piece stretched over the ultra-fine thread of the melody. Here again,  his unique way of slipping an intimate confidence without ever departing  from its abstract elegance. Behind Density 21.5 is already looming the shadow of her iconic solo Blue Lady (1983).

Source: Rosita Boisseau, INA