Press

Dressed in crimson, her hair in a cornette, sometimes playing the will-o'-the-wisp, sometimes mortified catechumen, [Nicole Mossoux] fills the deep and empty stage like a day without prayer with her presence [...].

Without resorting to blasphemous diversion or poetic aestheticism, opting instead for the pantomimic precision of gestures and the concrete drawing of states of mind, Nicole Mossoux gives us a “neo-confessional” performance whose motives, directed by Patrick Bonté, are inexhaustible! Thus she shows us what happens to the body in this tragi-comedy of the sacred and how this body, a spinning top moved by a string of blind gestures, trots and rambles through the dispensary of ritual occupations.

Stripping away the corolla of holy habits and their masochistic dialectic, which she takes great care to highlight through movement, the dancer travels through her pious childhood until she recreates, very precisely, this climate of fascination-repulsion which affects everyday life and marks, once and for all, a specific way of situating oneself in space. Thus, beyond the images of Christ in majesty, the reminiscences of the Virgin and of beatitude, through the rumblings of the Carrying of the Cross, the Entombments and other Visitations, it is from the combat with the Angel that the dancer speaks to us, of the eternally tempted and damned conscience.

Danièle Gillemon, Le Soir / December 1985

 

Masterful and inspired, this remarkable work will most likely, through the new choreography, reconcile all the hopeless philistines who reproach it for not having something to say often enough.

Stéphane Jousni, La Libre Belgique / December 1985

 

Nicole Mossoux explodes breaks the stranglehold of religious rituals, bewitches the holy body and its taboos and seduces sacred images to the point of exhaustion.

C. Le B., La Dernière Heure / December 1985

 

In this day and age a serious dance on a religious theme is rarely successful. To perform it in a blasphemous spirit or to turn it into parody is a meticulous balancing act. Nicole Mossoux, in her Juste Ciel has done neither, and has struck the perfect note with a dance work that conveys the divided feelings of someone looking back on her memories of a Catholic girlhood.

Luisa Moffett, The Bulletin / December 1985

 

Exploring the weight of the Catholic religion on our society, this performance lays the foundation for the entire artistic trajectory of Mossoux-Bonté. Taken up again 25 years after its creation, it has lost none of its relevance. Nicole Mossoux has passed her role on to a new performancer in a choreography that is fascinating and resolutely personal.

Jean-Marie Wynants, Le Soir / September 2012