Audience reactions

What would have interested me to discover: how such a performance is made. The synchronicity of the movements through space, the perfection of bodies intertwined with cords, the coincidental rhythm of each - by what invisible signs, which musical or lighting cues …

Oh how beautiful it all was!

When I spoke of the ‘idea of woman’: seeing Nicole Mossoux, I said to myself that all three women are surely a little bit her (I knew her a little and in person she’s very alluring). What I like: the determination and vulnerability, the intensity and fluidity, a cold gentleness, an on-going swing, each time more forceful or more quick, and also the versatility, the reversals, the spasms. The little girl’s swing, the hanged woman, the secretary, the exercise enthusiast, the lion-gazelle-bird-primate, running and flying, hanging, to hang oneself, turning one’s coat inside out, grey and intense red on the inside, all that one can do with a single article of clothing, even thrown on the floor, the sleeves that we thought impossible to dissimulate suddenly take the shape of a short scarlet skirt. Going faster than us, faster than everyone, to stay in flight, in creation, without anyone being able to make you fall, without the weight of passion, compassion, without violence or tension, in a lightness of spirit. Where is that place I seek in myself? What is the secret of these women? Do you have to do yoga, meditate, sing, dance? Yes, that must certainly have to do with how the body is used (as Nicholas Bouvier said: the use of the world). Words, what a trap.

Caroline Lamarche

 

The performance at the Halles is really enchanting: impossible not be carried away by an intense desire to participate in the swinging, the whirling, the running, the twirling, the ascensions, descents, soaring, the going and coming, the take offs and landings: all that magically takes us beyond a child-like and very physical desire to live the dream of mobility in the place of one of the choristers! Taken over, the jealously forgotten, because I’m not merely faced with a ‘spectacle’ but rather literally incorporated into the dance, the movement, the voices, the sounds. A violent energy is generated without anarchy. It is all executed with such synchronicity, the music, the live musicians with their daring voices so vibrant and affirmative! It is a form of plenitude rarely experienced, I must say, because the expectation, the hope, the hopelessness at the prospect of being consumed, transported, disoriented and bowled over are so out of proportion (for the audience members, like myself) that at times I despaired of not living the experience of unlimited rapture - without a second thought, without being distracted by a small obstinate song, sceptical and critical, somewhere in my head.

Jean Florence, Psychoanalyst

 

‘The story is in a loop. Our life cycles make circles. Different movements emulate the motion. The circumlocutions of our brains do not lead to our liberation, far from it. Are we puppets or puppet masters? Both? A dissonance resonates in the decoys, in familiar audibly distant silhouettes. The circle of time is the circus of our lives… Here the sound ruffles the surface of a symbiosis that struggles to establish itself - must it be reunified? A doubt is cast. The scene of this flying ballet, yet another circle, gives us hope for flight. But is it for the best?

Christian Provaux

 

The discovery: the composition of an aerial choreography that underscores the troubling kinetic music of Scelsi. Suspended by fine cords, three cross-legged dancers gravitate and engrave different tableaux in the air, suggesting both hangings and seduction. A shift toward performance would have been expected: it never comes. Dancers they are, dancers they stay, distorting notions of time and space.
The surprising geography transforms the simplest gestures into unreal images. Running without a floor, crossed legs without a chair… dancing without solid ground for support. Far from the fixed barre, the very contemporary aspect of the piece outlines a contemplative and dream-like performance that erases the words elongated, sitting and standing from our mental dictionary. When their movements are synchronised the dancers (with identical dress and hairstyles) create an image that is tripled, spectral, condensed, as if provoked by a visual disturbance, the crossing of hot with cold air, a dazzling halo that harbours another world we know does not exist yet is so magnetic that the pleasure leads us to accept the optical illusion. The compensation: a retinal perpetuity.

Mélanie Drouère, for Arcadi