Na Grani

A piece for 10 dancers created as part of France-Russia Year 2010

Following Mickaël Le Mer’s visits and meetings in Ekaterinburg in December 2008 and May 2009, he decided to create a piece for the 2010 France-Russia Year. This Russian city on the border between Europe and Asia, in the Urals, is an industrial centre. Its particular history and the dancers he met there paved the way for this new show. A poetic labour, resonating with the memory of bodies, forged by the exploration of the limits and frontiers of gesture, but also by the richness of the differences that each of us carries within us.

With Na Grani, Mickaël Le Mer creates a new choreographic vocabulary, far removed from hip-hop clichés and tourist postcards. It’s like drawing the letters of a common, hitherto unknown alphabet book on a blank page and signing your name, just to feel like you exist. In this melting pot, traces of the first urban graffiti – tags – appeared in the 70s on the New York Underground trains and those of today’s Russian Cyrillic alphabet, the figures left behind by breakdance and the vital breath brought by contemporary dance at the turn of the 80s. A melting pot for a close-knit tribe, resistant here, nomadic there, breathing where borders become movement, architecture and openness to the other, so different, so similar. On the march towards tomorrow, whatever borders we have to cross.

Source: Biennale de la Danse – Press kit 2010