16 & 17.03.19
CN D Pantin
Two couples are dancing: the only ones left. They confront each other. Their fatigue is tangible.
During the Great Depression in the USA, dance marathons arose. For hours, until exhaustion, the participants danced for money. The public, hypnotised by the show, made bets on the winners. There were many risks of disqualification, as in the real world. As in a cathartic mirror of the crisis which everyone was experiencing, marathons offered a perspective, perhaps not of glory, but at least of survival.
Émilie Pitoiset has been studying dance marathons since 2009. This iconography nourishes the repertory of gestures and postures which is at the heart of her stage and artistic work. On the borders of rupture or falling, these bodies intimately enduring the mechanisms of capitalism seem increasingly contemporary. Émilie Pitoiset (1980, lives and works in Paris) is an artist and choreographer. Her work examines the resistance of bodies through dance, rituals, sexuality and money. She deploys a visual grammar which borrows freely from film noir, the nouveau roman, secret societies and the ideals and fantasies of popular culture starting in the 1920s. She has participated in a large number of exhibitions in such institutions as Witte de With, the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Shirn Museum, the Museo Marino Marini, the Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong-Kong and the Cnap for La nouvelle adresse.
