Paso Doble

Réalisation : Josef Nadj,Miquel Barcelo,Bruno Delbonnel. Production : Les Poissons Volants, Festival d’Avignon.

Strictly speaking neither a show nor a performance, Paso Doble is the long-considered result of the encounter between two artists, the visual artist Miquel Barceló and the dancer and choreographer Josef Nadj. It is an ephemeral work of art, at the crossroads of two fields of experience and two artistic expressions. Where earth, clay has taken root as the point of origin and the protagonist of the confrontation.

To start with, there was the friendship between two men and Josef Nadj’s attentive presence at Miquel Barceló’s workshop. This immersion into his plastic universe and the “amazing opportunity to see works still open and emerging” nurtured in him the rather crazy desire to “enter the picture”. This was the origin of Paso Doble – with, for one man, the challenge of giving substance to his desire and, for the other, the challenge of integrating the presence of a partner and of working in public, in an extremely short time compared to his usual practice. However, Paso Doble is also the attempt to create a plastic work that merges with the very act of his creation. Since the final picture obtained on each reiteration of the experiment is immediately destroyed, erased. And nothing remains of it except in the memory of its direct witnesses or thanks to images such as those gathered in summer 2006 when Paso Doble was presented at the Église des Célestins in Avignon.

Source : Myriam Bloed