ELEMENTEN I - Room

For more than twenty years, Cindy Van Acker, a Flemish choreographer now living in Geneva – has been burning up our international stages with her astonishing works, which try to cross as many lines as possible, notably pushing the envelope sensorially with perception, sensation and of course with the dancers’ bodies. She uses sound, the set and the lighting to magnify and heighten her movements.
Cindy Van Acker is impressed by our company, by the intensity and commitment of its dancers who, according to her, go beyond virtuosity while also integrating it into their work and exploding its shapes. 

ELEMENTEN, A CYCLICAL PROJECT
ELEMENTEN is a project encompassing several upcoming creations by Cindy Van Acker; its title refers to the treatise Elements by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. The thirteen books of Elements are a mathematical and geometrical treatise, organized thematically. The first books focus on plane geometry, others deal with arithmetic and spatial geometry, containing many axioms, postulates and definitions.

I am inspired by the treatise in that I am using specific geometric principles to determine the trajectories of the dancers, their positions in the space, the notation of the movement, the rhythm of the lighting, perhaps even the set design.
But these theoretical elements involve only certain layers of the creation; each section of the ELEMENTEN cycle will have a sub-title which will evoke the essence of the project. 

ELEMENTEN I – Room
ELEMENTEN I – Room, the first section of ELEMENTEN, will be premiered by 16 dancers from the CCN ‑ Ballet de Lorraine in March 2016. It is a commission by Petter Jacobsson, to the mythical piece I am sitting in a room by the composer Alvin Lucier.

“I am working a lot with the idea of limitations.
This idea relates to the creation of ELEMENTEN I-Room specifically because of the radical choice of music, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier, created in 1996. It consists of a speech spoken by the composer himself, recorded, repeating and rebroadcast until the natural and resonant frequencies of the room come together, overpowering the concrete sound of the voice and any comprehension of the words.
The focus becomes tautological, the structure of the speech, repeated over and over, provokes its progressive transformation, its dislocation leading to its dissolution. Repetition creates a throughline around which perception moves, varying without stopping the ambitus (the curving melodic line) of its intensity, forcing it to become active, to see, to observe, to listen, to feel, to receive.
The limitations evoked in this work appear in the common space between the scenic player and the spectator, respectively the tautological transmitter and the receiver …
In terms of body language, the dialectic of limitations becomes part of my resistance when facing the virtuosity of the dancers, so that I may maintain the deep conviction which places the work between the two parties, weighting it with the restraint which allows me to push the dancers beyond their initial capacities, into unfamiliar terrain where a real exchange may take place.
The set consists of two elements, a dance floor measuring 8 meters x 8 meters imprinted with an image inspired by the spiral of Ulam, based on prime numbers, and a luminous object linked to software which regulates the light intensity relative to the sound.”
Cindy Van Acker – January 2016
Elementen II – Zaoum, a creation for 7 dancers of the Compagnie Greffe, will premiere at the Arsenic in Lausanne, based on Quando stanno morendo by Luigi Nono, co-produced by the Arsenic, the ADC in Geneva and the Théâtre Les Halles in Sierre.

Elementen III, whose subtitle is still TBA, will be a creation for 11 dancers of the Ballet du Grand Théâtre of Geneva for the opening evening of the Journées de la Danse Contemporaine Suisse in Geneva in 2017.