Bryan Campbell

Mingling images, texts and dance, Bryan Campbell’s pieces draw from visual culture to examine the bodily and cognitive mechanisms which they signal towards. Here, inspired as much by the American square dance as more contemporary social dances, he confronts the geometric rigour of the quadrille with the expressiveness of a free dance, or the abstraction of composition with the organicity of gestures. He thus rethinks the dividing line between pure form and sensitive experience so as to deconstruct the social lines of power which are translated into choreographic conventions. Little by little, the dancers of SQUARE DANCE evoke and navigate between other energies which choreography bodies –erotic energies, biopolitical energies, pharmaceutical energies – and thus cross over states that summon up pleasure and alienation, as well as the power to act and subjugation. It all draws out a testimony to disturbed ambiguities of contemporary rituals seeking for a sweeping intensity, in which the body both flourishes and examines itself.

After training at the Tisch School of the Arts at the University of New York and at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, Bryan Campbell now lives and works in Paris. He has danced for Loïc Touzé, Emmanuelle Huynh, Olivia Grandville, Ambra Senatore, Jocelyn Cottencin as well as Marco Berrettini, has been the assistant of Jacob Peter Kovner and Antonija Livingstone, and has created several pieces, including the series of solos Seven Activities of the Historical Object, the quartet Hares on the Mountain, MARVELOUS or Research for the Quadruped Protagonist, conceived as part of the Masters course exerce at the CCN of Montpellier.