Suivront mille ans de calme

Recorded at the Centre national de la danse 17 January 2014

Le Ballet Preljocaj leads the dance there where you least expect it! Created in 1998, the Groupe urbain d’intervention dansée (G.U.I.D.: the Urban Danced Action Group) has performed on many occasions in public spaces and unexpected venues to allow as many people as possible to discover contemporary dance.

“What hides beneath our contemporary rituals, in the folds of our existences?”

Suivront mille ans de calme (And then, one thousand years of peace) is part of a poetic and impressionist vein, like a work following on from a diligent but not reasoned reading of the Book of Revelation. We should thus looking for any images or clichés illustrating directly or in too referential a manner Saint John’s famous text. 

A fruitful source of inspiration, the very word Apocalypse, (from the Greek apo: lift and calypsis: the veil), nevertheless conjures up the idea of revealing, unveiling, or highlighting elements that, could be present in our world but are hidden from our gaze.

Thus the aim would be more to conjure up what is nestled in the folds of our existences than to prophesise compulsive torrents of disasters, irremediable destructions or the imminence of the end of the world. 

Is not dance, art of the unutterable par excellence, when the aim is to assume the role of developer (in the photographic sense), the best suited to fulfil this delicate function of laying bare our fears, our anxieties and our hopes. It mercilessly highlights the entropy of the molecules, programmed in the memory of our flash, which announces the Apocalypse of the body. It stigmatises our rituals and reveals the incongruity of our postures, whether they are social, religious or pagan. 

Suivront mille ans de calme (And then, one thousand years of peace) aims to touch on this blind drift of bodies, tossed and turned by ideals and beliefs, somewhat lost between the lines of the Apocalypse.  

Source: programme of the CND