N° 11 : Le bleu est à la mode cette année…

Recorded at the CND in Pantin 9 October 2006

“No-one can get away from fashion advertising,” says Laure Bonicel, and it has a firm grip. The poses of the body themselves are shaped by the ambient mythologies and images which permanently surround us. This modelling of the body and posture is all the more powerful because it is subliminal. Hence the importance of investigating its workings and effects, and possibly disarming them. Alongside the company’s five dancers, Laure Bonicel trained ten amateurs for the performance of her project at the Centre National de la Danse. They worked intensively together within the composition rules laid down by the choreographer, assisted by Christine Bombal. Advertising photographs, linked by other images belonging to other equally-codified worlds, or with just as many connotations, served as a thematic springboard. But the preparatory work concentrated essentially on acquiring a quality of presence and mutual listening,

Some parts of the choreography are written down, but most of the sequences are reinvented with each performance as an “instant composition”. The work upstream was nevertheless so coherent that the choreography appears to flow naturally, as if a shared pulse animates the movements of the performers in the space.
Groups form, take up a pose and melt away, creating a whole lot of images and attitudes which seem to emanate from a collective cultural melting pot. And yet singularities eventually emerge.  For in probing this shared material from which our gestures are woven, finally, it is the ceaseless working on difference that wins the day.

Annie Suquet

Digital resource – Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse
http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003974

Updating: March 2010