Crowd

Since Showroomdummies (2001), Gisèle Vienne’s pieces have been constantly probing the eternal duality – Eros and Thanatos, Apollo and Dionysus – that lies at the heart of our humanity, the necessary thirst for violence and sensuality that each of us carries within us, in all its erotic but also its sacred aspects. Crowd is a new phase in this singularly constant research. A choreography devised for fifteen performers gathered together for the duration of a party, this loose polyphony sheds light on all the mechanisms underlying such manifestations of collective euphoria, and “the way in which a specific community copes (or doesn’t cope) with the expression of violence”. Nourished by philosophy and visual arts, Gisèle Vienne stages a universe of fragmentation, in which several realities and temporalities coexist. A universe where jerky gestures borrow as much from urban dance as from puppet theatre, where Dennis Cooper’s dramaturgy and Peter Rehberg’s DJ set function as agents that disrupt our perception at the same time as they blur the line between daydream and frenzied rave. At once contemporary and powerfully archaic in its cathartic dimension, Crowd opens up a dialogue with our most intimate selves.