La complainte du progrès

Soft and relentless irony, Boris Vian’s « La Complainte du progrès » by ALIS drags us into a bizarre universe where reality continuously falls into absurdity, nonsense, troubling weirdness.

With its gentle and implacable irony, Boris Vian’s La Complainte du progrès, seen by ALIS (Dominique Soria, Pierre Fourny), immerses us in a wacky universe, where reality never ceases to slip into the incongruous, the absurd and even an unsettling strangeness. A couple meticulously occupied by various activities (serving themselves coffee, shaving, dressing, preparing a meal, doing the laundry) sees its universe invaded by the repeated onslaughts of progress. 

Claudio Pazienza’s film is tidy and energetic: the visual pirouettes that mark the damaging effects of progress, its regrettable and funny consequences, lead us slowly to the final breakdown. Everything falls apart. Washbasins overflow, bodies get hurt, and the most innocuous gestures capture our full attention. And, when, with a simple blow of a rolling pin, coloured letters appear, we tell ourselves that magic has scant regard for the sophisticated machines that domesticate our reality.

Source : Fabienne Arvers

The idea has all it takes to please: with the complicity of a director, a choreographer plays along by masterfully setting to dance a melody taken from the repertoire of French song, where, most often, poetry rhymes with humour and tenderness. While none of these dances resembles a video-clip supposed to illustrate the song, they are always an original choreographic proposal. A contemporary version of the old “chansons de geste” (French epic poems), they allow access, in just a few minutes, to the highly diversified universes of the choreographers. Take a song, its verses and its chorus, the interpreter’s tone of voice, the subject or the atmosphere evoked, and see what images, colours, figures and rhythms dance could give them.

Source : Fabienne Arvers