Promenade Obligatoire

PROMENADE OBLIGATOIRE is a non-stop on-stage journey along a timeline for eight popping specialists, an explosive hip-hop dance style based on blocked, isolated, dislocated muscle movements. From compact mass to molecular chains, from ideally ordered formations resembling military parades to differentiation, the dancers proceed through a succession of evanescent states. Together they comprise a moving matter endowed with a collective memory, their past evolutions re-emerging cyclically, confronting oblivion, instinct and the desire of creation. Along this living timeline, in which the individual struggles alternately against a deterministic path and his own imprisonment, the hip-hop dance is broken down and transposed into a lateral movement that becomes enchanting. Played out against an electronic musical score with industrial overtones, PROMENADE OBLIGATOIRE examines the various possible states of “togetherness” in an ever-changing society.

“Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: because it is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of the dance is contained in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-freedom.” In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopia We (1920), the promenade is a march in rows of four, in which the state of synchronization appears like a victory over the uncertainty of Nature.

Source : Compagnie par Terre

More information : www.compagnieparterre.fr