Nowhere and everywhere

Just as speeches have their sub-conversations, bodies have their sub-gestures: tiny micro-changes that constantly modify postures and faces, and accompany our every word almost unconsciously. Myriam Gourfink invests this unique language, which is specific to each individual, with a variable-geometry troupe of 12 to 45 amateur dancers, with the most diverse profiles. Drawing on Rudolf Laban's movement analysis tools, she has collected this bodily material from them to extract a common vocabulary. Envisaged as a sharing of practices and knowledge, this creative process, which is as important as the final result, received the musical collaboration of electronic composer Kasper T. Toeplitz. The gestures collected then served as reference points, between which the performers experience a "flowing time", i.e. a diffuse dance that takes place "nowhere and everywhere". The result is a story of bodies – a tribute to "what constitutes us and at the same time escapes us" – bearing the memory of our identities.

Myriam Gourfink

A leading figure in French choreographic research, choreographer and dancer Myriam Gourfink has spent the last twenty years formalizing her own compositional language, based on Laban notation. She was artist-in-residence at IRCAM and Micadanses, and she directed the Programme de recherche et de composition chorégraphiques (PRCC) at the Fondation Royaumont from 2008 to 2013, and programmed the "Les danses augmentées" cycle at Gaîté Lyrique in 2012. Both abstract and sensitive, her dance is based on a rigorous organization of our stance and gait and an acute awareness of space.