Shelter

A creation for 7 dancers and a bass player.
Shelter is a carnivalesque deployment of celestial and insolent figures.

Shelter follows the principle of all my other creations: to choose a place, to make a face of it, to shelter there forms of life and thoughts, to garden possibilities until ending up by ensauvaging them. Since Ciel (2012), through the body-place of Inês (2014), the Street (2015), the Sidewalk (2019), the Metropolis (2021), the notion of eros inside the earth in Erosion (2021) or in the poetics of the face proposed by L'œil la bouche et le reste (2017), I am looking for all-encompassing places, capable of manifesting the fragility of the bodies in connection with social violence, in order to stage anxieties, fights, entanglements. This aesthetic choice of crossing places goes hand in hand with the will to choreograph links as well as forms, to dance complicities; but above all to propose to the spectators the experience of remobilizing thought, the gaze and the community through the force of joy. With each creation, a process is put in place to say something about this world of violence and also of courage, a world that asks us even more today to believe in metamorphosis, in co-construction and in contamination as a territory of mixtures populated with humor, diversity and vitality. The departure of Abri, which questions this time in my career as a choreographer the very idea of place and its power of protection, begins with the following question: What can shelter us for a specific commitment, for an involvement nourished by our own struggles, our vulnerabilities and our practical, bodily, and above all, very concrete knowledge?

Shelter: Refuge space
We are looking for a shelter capable of sheltering a form of solidarity, of producing the feeling of being attached to a land and to someone, of being at the same time globalized and connected with distant lands. The earth is going badly and the fantasy of total destruction haunts us. It is time to taste this ground that is giving way. It is time to confront this indigestion caused by the floor shaking. But it is also time to dream of an effective protection against the insults of cannibal capital. To build a shelter, modest and supportive, which puts us out of danger and distant from any will of overpowering man against life, nature, the body. Not without laughter, since there is no feeling of catastrophe or apocalypse. It will be necessary to continue, and the laughter can help us to better build a real shelter; refuge of the obsessive evil.  The figure of the clown, laughter and melancholy will be shelters, ways to escape the negative vortex of disaster.

SHOWS

FREIBOURG, Germany. 16 may 2024. Théâtre Freibourg.
MARSEILLE, France. 16 march 2024. KLAP
CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, France. 6 october 2023. CDCN L'Échangeur. Festival C'est comme ça!
LAUSANNE, Switzerland. 6-7 July 2023. Festival de la Cité.
CERGY, France. 19 and 20 April 2023. Théâtre de Louvrais. Points-Communs Scène Nationale de Cergy.
POITIERS, France. 6 April 2023. Théâtre Beaulieu. Festival À Corps.
VITRY-SUR-SEINE, France. 23 and 24 march 2023. Théâtre Jean Villar. Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne (Première)