Tempéraments

Recorded at the CND 31 January 2014

Tempéraments by Edmond Russo and Shlomi Tuizer marks a new phase in the collaboration between the two choreographers.

Inherited from Hippocrates, the theory of temperaments is based on four humours: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. From this metaphorical reading of the body, Edmond Russo and Shlomi Tuizer have extracted a choreographic thread with multiple ramifications, a formal architecture opening out onto principles of circulation, proportions and expression of the body. Built around a group of four dancers, Tempéraments articulates a grammar of contradictory states: in turn strange individuals, figures with abstract forms, forces dominated by their impulses or members of the same living being, the interpreters pass through a variety of moods – different ways of treating movement and its possibilities of expression.

In a game of variations to the rhythm of Andrea Cera’s musical composition, the work leads us through the temperaments as though they were obscure areas of the human psyche. Each stage formalises an affect, an inhabitation of the space, from which abstract or embodied, common or fantastic tableaux leap forth. From a playful phantasmagoria we move to an abstract organisation, from light to chiaroscuro, from contemplation to raw energy, from solitude to fusion. Linking old and new, allegorical and kinetic, Tempéraments proposes a subjective mapping whose landmarks constantly change: four areas of the mind populated by voices, whispers, figures, where each interpreter unveils their irrevocable singularity, which largely exceeds all categories.

Source: programme of the CND