The trompe l’œil of danced theatre

Histoire de l'imposture

The luxury of a Broadway show of dreamy and poetic proportions… I will surely be the only one to risk such a comparison.
This poisonous jewel portrays the nude beings of a terrestrial paradise, anonymous, beautiful and lost in the shadows of limbs, searching their way toward civilisation and its accoutrements, to sounds that stream from our collective musical memory like a myriad of small explosions. The sound of cities is heard from a distance as if coming to us from a garden next door. It is here alone that the form is the subject matter. Social dancing, the dance of side-kicks, men as centaurs, feminine dervishes, women who suddenly break into a can-can and in their rage dare to assume their real nature.
From false seriousness to mechanical smiles, a cavalcade of attitudes is borrowed from a world of codes taken from courtly tradition and modern day television and unfolds in a progressive symphony of intentional trip-ups.

The choreographic vocabulary of Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté has matured since the much loved Simonetta Vespucci. Freed from all traces of anecdote, it is in perpetual movement, as if you were to see rather than hear Pachelbel’s Canon. The fluidity is remarkable, a continuous harmony of gestures that integrates grace and its opposite.
A Botticellian performance, Tiepolesque, that beautifully and cleverly depicts imposture.

 

^{Jo Dekmine • 2015}