Faux mouvement

Recorded at the CND 29 November 2012

In a game which invites the bodies, the space and the light to distort the audience’s perspective, sometimes to the point of creating a mirage, four dancers investigate the relationship with speed, the theme of accidents, the idea of false movements.  Fabrice Lambert is currently working as a long-term artist in residence at the Centre national de la danse (National Dance Centre), for three seasons from 2012 to 2015, with the support of the Seine-Saint-Denis administrative department.

In “Faux movement”, the four dancers are immersed in a space with a false bottom and sometimes disconcerting sound and visual layers. Fabrice Lambert’s inspiration for this piece was writings by the philosopher Paul Virilio on speed and the idea of the accident which, according to him, characterise the modern world: isn’t reality affected by a succession of accidents which guide its evolution?

On stage, the tense bodies of the dancers, tossed about from one posture to another, subjected to accelerations and abrupt stops, are fully engaged in taking risks, as if trying to thwart a constant and inexpressible threat.

“After the group piece “SOLAIRE” (SOLAR), I wanted to continue my research into Virilio’s writings and to ask what physical engagement is today.

This engagement is questioned in two ways: what are the stakes and the requirements for physical engagement? What does it allow that I don’t suspect? Part of this answer can be found in the idea of what we wrongly call “false movements”… The first idea is to question the number of concrete, inadequate things that we very often encounter. On the one hand, we find all kinds of impeded or painful movements, jumps on the spot, sliding, seesawing and falling over; on the other, bad postures, false positions − wobbly, unstable or untenable positions, improbable, even impossible, positions, where the price the body must pay to be at rest again seems to be an increasingly fast oscillation between two irreconcilable and unsatisfactory solutions.

What interests me in the absurdity of these situations is not the contradiction in itself, but the thwarted movements which create an impossible posture: “perpetual jumps” from one position to the other, “rocking”, “swaying”, “coming and going”, vertiginous “shuttling back and forth”: it is in this generally unperceivable agitation that fantasies, mirage-like effects, are produced…

This question reflects on the concept of false movement itself. On the one hand, the false movement, as a movement, is a simple act – it calls for a special effort of intuition, a seizing of the posture behind the position, of the tendency behind the direction; but on the other hand, if it is indeed a false movement, it must be reduced in one way or another to quasi-mechanical movement. But it is all about knowing exactly what a false movement is and how to retrace it.”

Fabrice Lambert

Updating: June 2013