Insaisies

This work carries with it the irony, anxiety, shaded gravity that gave dance Bagouet its incredible depth.

Choreography: Dominique Bagouet

… The writing was becoming more and more significant and hectic, and the counting systems more and more complicated. “Insaisies” was sheer madness, with little movements, some very accurate and well counted steps, and it was based on musical comedy. It was a sort of a relic of the musical:  Fred Astaire once put through the mill of modernity […].

I wanted to write a funny play, I wanted to make the audience laugh as never before… And it is the most tragic play I have ever written in my whole life, the most nostalgic. A black, white and grey universe… Even the leaves of lettuce which were sewed here and there on the costumes gave a surreal and definitely sad aspect. May be absurd, but not funny… I found myself overwhelmed by my subconscious.

Sources: Dominique Bagouet, “interviewed by Isabelle Ginot” – April 2 1988

With “Insaisies”, Bagouet does not play the obvious:  he hides his extraordinary and private domain behind show and appearance, behind the scathing humour which covers these relief images with glaze. This play may be a story about men and women, but it is most probably a bestiary, a raft of small Medusae on which some characters would have been thrown, searching for nothing, not even for a dialogue, nor communication, or searching only just long enough for a movement to be half made or for a dazzling trio to sway near the edge.

Those animals sail in the half-light, looking like hens and cockerels, hopping, starting, cackling and pecking, in sad clowns costume… They sport some green lettuce coloured protuberances, like the sign of some growing disease, and there is much grey as they are certainly not happy.

Their humble and pathetic ride-odyssey is spiked with weird and dissonant bulges, and barely diffused tiny signs. Bagouet’s choreography and Henri d’Artois’ vibrant music therefore give birth to a bitter and gloomy patchwork, like an inevitable game of ping-pong between beings and their nothingness.

“Insaisies” resembles a take-off of a musical, some broken and icy pantomime:  it is a piercing look fixed on a pathetic universe.

The whole company is of quality. And there is Bagouet…, a fabulous dancer, a dismembered and electrified marionette, reaching out invisible revolvers for invisible suicides. “Insaisies”, this ironical and bitter human zoo, distils to whoever wishes and without warning, remarkable waves of emotion.’

Sources: François Cohendy

Credits

Choreography: Dominique Bagouet

Duration: 8’30”

Dancers: Dominique Bagouet, Sylvie Giron, Bernard Glandier, Nuch Grenet, Catherine Legrand, Yveline Lesueur, Angelin Preljocaj.

Music: Henri d’Artois and Dizzie Gillepsie

Scenery: Christine Le Moigne

Stage lighting: Jacques Chatelet

Costumes: Dominique Bagouet

Direction:Charles Picq

Production: Maison de la danse de Lyon, Les Carnets Bagouet

Date of creation: July 5th 1982, Cour Jacques Cœur at Montpellier

Performance recorded in May 1983, Maison de la Danse de Lyon

Last update: December 2012