Pour Antigone

Parce que la tragédie grecque ne mettait pas en scène des personnages mais des forces, des tensions, des chocs et des formes particulières de désirs, la danse et les chœurs y tenaient une place essentielle.

Because Greek tragedy did not stage characters but rather forces, tensions, shocks and special forms of desire, dance and choruses occupied a vital place. Could the powerful NO of Antigone, the very figure of disobedience who refuses until gridlock, and at the cost of her life, the law of humankind, be expressed other than by intensities of bodies that escape from themselves? To present this, for a choreographer such as Mathilde Monnier, is to rediscover the mechanisms and the very meaning of the word tragic within a present-day cultural and social context. In this instance, to confront, far from all illusions of conciliatory race-mixing, physical and musical readings of Antigone brilliantly interpreted by African and Western artists. Two worlds which, closely observing the other, never cease through a clever dramaturgy to measure their differences and their disparities in order to invent the fragile space where they could come together in us.

Source: Isabelle Launay