Exhibitions

The CN D’s Nouvelle cinémathèque de la danse Portraits collection presents the work of various choreographers in half-hour montages of extracts from performances focusing on a particular aspect from the wealth of dance material. This exhibition of films presents five portraits that are screened continuously in the Galerie space.

Daniel Linehan, rythme et langage
Lisbeth Gruwez, de l‘endurance
Métamorphoses de François Chaignaud
Gisèle Vienne, le suspens
Miet Warlop, quel bordel !

 

Gisèle Vienne, le suspens
30 minutes

Gisèle Vienne’s dance seems never to give up on narrating something – even if it not always clear exactly what. Perhaps nothing specific at all, perhaps just the simple feeling of there being a story. What matters above all is the construction of effects of suspense and suspension to say that we (spectators, humans) have been caught up in a tale that transcends us and could aggress as at any moment (as in the gory prose of Dennis Cooper, the choreographer’s regular collaborator). Puppets, skaters, clubbers: each of Gisèle Vienne’s characters is trapped on the horizon of a threatening world. Blows, injuries, death: the worst is almost always certain, in fact look, it’s coming, it’s here.

Metamorphoses by François Chaignaud
30 minutes

All the pieces written by François Chaignaud, most often in collaboration (with Cecilia Bengolea, Nino Laisné, Théo Mercier…) unfailingly satisfy the following principle: in them, can be seen living, singing, dancing “characters who have no choice but to transform reality according to their desires”: be it the “gypsy” who circles around a motionless biker, who is as black as death (Radio Vinci Park), flower-performers in Soufflette, or the contemporary recumbent effigies of Sylphide, they all struggle to transcend their conditions to produce bodies without norms, who have managed to transgress the categories in which life and the world sought to assign and confine them.

Lisbeth Gruwez, de l’endurance
30 minutes

Since she started writing her own choreographies, after being a talisman performer during the great years of Flemish dance, in particular with Jan Fabre, Lisbeth Gruwez has pressed on into the same zone: the exhaustion of gestures, the endurance of movements. Everything must persist and resist. Whether it be with hilarious jerks (AH/HA), an undulating torso (Lisbeth Gruwez dances Bob Dylan) or the backwash of a wave (The Sea Within), the point is always to push movement beyond what is reasonable, as far hypnosis and, perhaps, trance. The bodies – both those of the performers and the spectators – struggle with fatigue, then get their respiration back, to breathe just so as to endure such a harsh duration.

Daniel Linehan, rhythm and language
15 minutes

How to sum up Daniel Linehan? Rhythm and language. For this American choreographer, born in 1982 and based in Brussels since his years of training at P.A.R.T.S., what is evocative about us is what gives meaning and rapidity to our gestures. Sometimes these are just murmurs, decomposed syllables or groans (Digested Noise) and sometimes phrases by Hugo Ball or Plato. Sometimes, it is a constantly repeated sentence (Not About Everything) and, other times, words which the dancers shake up to the rhythm of lights that go on / go out. But, each time, language is the place where gestures discover a reason to be born and to invent subtle discourses full of retakes and interruptions.

Miet Warlop, la désinstallation
2019, 16 min.

Plaster and paint, water and plastic, inflatable objects and explosive sculptures, animal bodies and absurd protheses: the world of Miet Warlop, visual-artist performer or performing visual artist, it all depends, often consists in unsettling the world ludically, wildly and often destructively. Paint guns sullying a milky whiteness (Big Bears Cry Too) or exploding chemical solutions, feathers flying everywhere, or a set shattered by blows from a ladder (Mystery Magnet): in any case, the stage space is devoted to attending its own reconfiguration. But this is not a sad apocalypse. On the contrary, it is genuinely creative because the world which has been beaten up by Miet Warlop is actually inviting us into a new balance. In an unsettled world, we can always settle down again