Un-2-Men-Show

Satirical duet dealing with tango with two men. Recorded at the CND 7 February 2005

Following an initial collaboration for “The Show” in 2001, Foofwa d’Imobilité and Thomas Lebrun created “Un-twomen-show”. This was their response to a commission from Lille 2004/Capitale Culturelle, a show with the general theme of the Tango. The two choreographers decided to produce a “show documentary” capable of setting up a dialogue between the video and the proposed stage design. They obviously wanted to make reference to the history of the Argentinian tango, but they were also interested in how it has been used in the history of dance, particularly contemporary. They chose to quote from, even to parody, artists who have used the tango in their work: Jean-Claude Gallotta, Oscar Araïz, Merce Cunningham, Dominique Bagouet, Daniel Larrieu, Hans Van Manen… It was an opportunity to play with the identities of the genres and to borrow this couple dance to deconstruct the social roles of women and men. This show is an engaged show. But the engagement is with pleasure. The tremendous presence of the two performers transforms the pastiche into a series of iconoclastic presentations which they call “théorires” in French (a portmanteau of “theories” and “laugh”).

Laughter is a lucid force.
From tango lessons à la Mademoiselle Yvonne to the butchers’ tango by Boris Vian (in chanson de geste style), from a Geisha duet to an American review, the choreographers grab hold of clichés to offer us an alternative reading. Derision keeps seriousness at bay and opens the way for the deformation of codes and forms. The Argentinean writer Jose-Luis Borges recalls the tango he saw “danced against the golden background of dusk by people capable of a quite other dance, that of the knife”. But here, the knife is this theatrical blade, which stabs to the heart of falsehood’s power. Foofwa d’Imobilité and Thomas Lebrun take a “social dance”, appropriate it and transform it as they will. The dancers draw on their respective territories to mutually influence each other and their complementary natures create shifts. In this final part of the show, one is dressed in white, the other in black: the pairing of yin and yang. Their connivance is generous and draws us into a dressing-up game where the mask is an art of surfaces, an art of living, a joyful obstruction to oversimplifications around the issue of identity. Their precision in movement is astounding in contrast to the casualness they flaunt.  Excess is combined with the art of detail, popular practice calls upon cultural capital; a cabaret performance gives an account of an enquiry into contemporary art. Everything happens as if, finally, it is the possibility of playing itself that is at stake.

Geisha Fontaine

Further information

Digital resource by the Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse
http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003980

Updating: March 2010