Paula Pi

This piece was originally created as a duet with Sorour Darabi. For artistic reasons, it then evolved into a solo in which the question of the same and the other, of identity and a double are worked on in the same body.

At the beginning, a voice: the recording of a timbre, a breath, like the appearance of a radical otherness. At the beginning, a language: a rhythm, a phrasing, a repetition, a meaning that slips away. From this voice a series of questions affecting language is born. What can dance do with a voice: attempt to approach the world it transports at the border of meaning, or redeploy a movement in the depths of its intensities, or its frictions, so as to reconstitute its own system of sensation and interpretation? After a journey through the physical, linguistic or anthropological questions raised by this recording, concerning a male rite of passage, Paula Pi has produced a piece – while making this forename the pass word to a possible transformation. As in her previous creation, Ecce (H)omo, the departure material sets the coordinates of a new sensitive territory. First accompanied by the performer Sorour Darabi, then alone, Paula Pi has tied a knot, an interweaving, in which has been curled a reflection about the construction of what is the same and what is different. Between her body, her voice and her imaginary doubles there arises a ritual navigation between the near and the far, fusion and cut-off, dream and reality, masculine and feminine.

Paula Pi started by studying music, the theatre and Butoh, before discovering contemporary dance. After graduating in classical music at the University of Campinas, she took a Ex.e.r.ce masters at the CCN of Montpellier from 2013 to 2015, where she worked on the notion of reconstitution and studied the dances of the German choreographer Dore Hoyer. In 2017, this research led to the creation of the solo Ecce (H)omo. She also works with various choreographers: Holly Cavrell, Clarissa Sachelli, Eszter Salamon, Latifa Laâbissi/Nadia Lauro, Pauline Simon, Anna Anderegg, Aude Lachaise...