Effroi

Recorded at the CND 22 November 2005

[Terror] 

“What does it mean to be whole, and is the identity one and indivisible?” Sylvain Prunenec asks himself. Since 1998 this uncertainty has run through the choreographer’s research. Examined closely by experimentation, the body’s supposed coherence reveals unsuspected chinks. So the movement loosens up and breaks down, its usual mechanisms are thrown off track. The unity of the body falls apart, opening up a territory of possibilities, a world to be born. In the course of this exploration, Prunenec found echoes of his preoccupations in many mythological tales that deal with the dismembered body. But certain episodes of the Orpheus myth aroused particular resonances in him, especially the final moment where the severed head of Orpheus floats away on the water still singing. Here the voice takes on an extreme importance: it is the ultimate and subtle manifestation of that continuity of identity to which the body, once broken up, can no longer testify.

If “Effroi” tests movement to breaking point, the different states of the dance are bound to each other by Prunenec’s voice reciting the poems of Célia Houdart, and by the intensity of the electronic music, played live by composer Fred Bigot.

An existential game between dispersal and re-composition, “Effroi” ceaselessly asks the same question of the territory. The intimate territory of the body, explored like a fluctuating cartography of the internal pathways, which is in constant need of reconfiguration. But also the external territory. Sylvain Prunenec called upon stage designer Élise Capdenant to construct a space to the proportions – or disproportions – of the body.

The set conceived by Capdenant – a sort of map drawn on the ground – takes on a thousand connotations. Bathed in Gilles Gentner’s lighting, the dancers appear minuscule, hanging onto the contour lines of an immense blown-up map. Or is it rather a brain seen in cross section which forms the setting for the evolutions of a microscopic Prunenec? Might at least his dance be curling up and uncurling around this ageless shape – shell, fossil or matrix? A dialogue weaves itself between the external and internal territories, each measuring and modulating the perception of the other, in a continual reinvention.

Annie Suquet 

Further information

Digital resource by the Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse
http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003845

Updating: March 2010