Just to dance...

Just to dance…, the playful title of this latest work, reveals a stage landscape born from the shifting fluctuating choreography of bodies in movement imprinted with and metamorphosized by the rich and vivid personalities of the assembled individuals.

(creation 2010)

Conception Héla Fattoumi / Eric LamoureuxChoreography in collaboration with the performers Princia Jéarbuth Biyéla/Ghyslaine Gau, Marine Chesnais, Tetsuro Hattori, Aucarré Ikoli N’Kazi, Orchy Nzaba, Philippe Rouaire, Alissa Shiraishi, Kei Tsujimoto, Moustapha ZianeComposition and musical performance Camel Zekri (guitar, Biomuse, programing) Dominique Chevaucher (voice, theremin) Scenography Stéphane Pauvret Lighting Design Xavier Lazarini Costume Elise Magne Sound Engineer Philippe Petit Set Construction Jackie BauxProduction CCNC/BN Coproduction Espace des Arts – Scène nationale de Chalon-sur-Saône, Grand Théâtre – Ville de Lorient, théâtre de Caen, Le Trident – Scène nationale de Cherbourg-OctevilleThe new music for this work benefited from a Commission from the French government.With the support of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie

Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux, choreographers and directors of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen/Basse-Normandie (CCNC/BN), are attempting this improbable act: transforming the experience of “living together” into dance.At the same moment that France is set to open a debate that would define the concept of identity as something immobile and limitative, the two choreographers have brought together three dancers from the Republic of Congo, Princia Jéarbuth Biyéla, Aucarré Ikoli N’Kazi and Orchy Nzaba, and the Japanese dancers Kei Tsujimoto, Alissa Shiraishi and Tetsuro Hattori, all encountered during their choreographic peregrinations outside the West, with three performers from the CCNC/BN, Marine Chesnais, Philippe Rouaire and Moustapha Ziane, for a symphony of otherness.

Just to dance…, the playful title of this latest work, reveals a stage landscape born from the shifting fluctuating choreography of bodies in movement imprinted with and metamorphosized by the rich and vivid personalities of the assembled individuals. Scintillating with exchange, energy and relationships, Héla Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux’s sensitive gathering of these singularities gives structure to a cosmogony defined by its shifting gravitational centres – as many nuggets overflowing, shattering, growing. The music of multi-instrumentalist Camel Zekri and soprano Dominique Chevaucher unfolds between tradition and improvisation. Tinted electro, it rustles and scurries through this vast space of the expansion of the body, where a positive vision of a future One World is being sketched out. Refusing possible borders (of languages, nations, culture…), the different imaginative universes nourished by the eleven performers merge into an intensely human stage experience. With this group rich in diversity, Just to dance… attempts to bring down the walls, succeeding – to use the words of Édouard Glissant – in “imagining the Other, imagining side by side with the Other, imagining the Other within Oneself”.

Just to dance… utopia under way…