Printemps

Julie Desprairies décide de s’approprier le lieu grâce au concours de ses usagers et employés. Avec eux et son équipe, elle part à la découverte physique de ces espaces neufs pour en comprendre les enjeux, en donner une lecture qui leur ressemble.

Christian de Portzamparc’s building consists of three entities: the Musée de Bretagne, a scientific space and its planetarium, and a library that intermingle. Recently inaugurated at the time of Julie Desprairies’s creation, this monumental building has not yet been fully adopted by its users. Many criticise its enormity: it is too expensive, too vast, too sculptural.

Printemps is the result of a commission. This time the choreographer did not choose the site and nor is she familiar with this type of architecture. Julie Desprairies decided to appropriate the place with the help of its users and employees. With them and her team, she set off to physically discover these new spaces, to understand their issues and to give them an interpretation that resembles them.

With dance just as with scenography, there’s no question of trying to be the most spectacular. “The challenge was to take on Portzamparc’s writing with our tools, means, references and tastes, often far removed from those of the architect. He suspends the museum lobby and makes his ground floor completely clear of supporting structures, adorns his frontage with a sculpture, places a pyramid on its top, slants a planetarium: we shall sleep, read and draw on the windows, we shall grow green plants”, she declares. 

A corps de ballet made up of one representative from each of the 37 towns of the agglomeration that had participated in equipment funding, was recruited, a large collection of flowery textiles exchanged for seeds to be grown in the abandoned areas of the building was launched, videos testifying to the inclusion of the building in its nearby (the district) and distant (Brittany) context were shot, a repertoire of scores by Philippe Hersant was assembled… At the end of the day, 92 dancers, 17 architects/visual artists and 46 musicians, for a total of eight months during regular meetings supervised by 14 professionals (4 dancers, one visual artist, one architect, one light designer, one videomaker, one conductor, one choirmaster, 4 music teachers), worked together to elaborate a shared gestural, plastic and musical vocabulary.

Printemps, the public rendering of this work, for a capacity of 700 spectators, is devised as a vast factory in which the public is invited to create its own path. Everything is moving as everything is at work, in action. The public is won over by the dance, and quickly it’s impossible to know who’s a dancer and who isn’t, which movement is planned, set and written and which action is improvised by chance. There is a delicate balance between the danced gesture and the fortuitous dance, all the more so in a place that encourages the displacement of bodies.

Source : Cie Desprairies