DANCE ON ENSEMBLE

7 Dialogues

The 7 Dialogues conceived by DANCE ON ENSEMBLE resemble a musical and choreographic laboratory. For this project, each member of the company teamed up with a choreographer or director with the aim of creating a solo in the form of a self-portrait. To link everything together, the project’s artistic director, composer Matteo Fargion, offered them a single musical structure: that of Schubert’s Erlkönig, inspired by Goethe’s Erlking, which features a fantastic creature that haunts forests. Five extracts will be presented in the CN D’s spaces. For the project, the American dancer Ty Boomershine encountered the minimalist world of Beth Gill, an emerging New York-based choreographer, who studied at the Tisch School of the Arts. On the other side of the Atlantic, the German Brit Rodemund embarked on a collaboration with Lucy Suggate, an independent dancer known in the UK for her powerful and engaging solos. Others have chosen to work with artists trained in the theatre. The director and visual artist Tim Etchells, whose company, Forced Entertainment, is internationally renowned, took part with Jone San Martin, a former Forsythe dancer, who has also become a choreographer. As for Christopher Roman, artistic director of DANCE ON ENSEMBLE, he called on an unclassifiable artist who works at the frontier of performance, theatre and dance: Ivo Dimchev, currently based in Brussels. Then there is Frédéric Tavernini, a dancer and choreographer who trained at the dance school of the Opéra de Paris, whose career has taken him to the Béjart Ballet Lausanne, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon and the Ballet de Marseille. All these original artists, whose style has been forged through decades of experience and collaborations, are linked together by Matteo Fargion’s musical tapestry in which dancers, choreographers and directors are all equal before the art of choreography.
 

Tenacity of Space

Deborah Hay never became attached to a language. In Tenacity of Space, this pioneer of postmodern dance continues her fundamental work on practice as a way of expanding the dancer’s horizons. With the DANCE ON dancers, she sought experimental conditions that would make it possible for them to give expression to their experience in space. The title of the piece came by chance from Jim Crace’s novel Harvest, which describes the cataclysmic transformation of an agricultural community. Tenacity of Space was created against the backdrop of the election of Donald Trump and the movements of Syrian migrants, which Deborah Hay, who sees dance as her form of ‘political activism’, has responded to through pure movement, an almost ‘Buddhist’ movement that starts out from the visual field of each dancer. After working with performers of every level, the American choreographer has concentrated on experienced dancers. With DANCE ON, she has found seasoned partners. She is particularly preoccupied with the issue of age: ‘I had to find another way of pursuing what I wanted to do that was not connected with physical endurance or virtuosity.’ To the latter Deborah Hay has preferred sober simplicity and a search for what dance can be when proven effects are set aside. Tenacity of Space epitomises her. She quotes Gaston Bachelard’s Poétique de l’espace: ‘Immensity is within us. It is linked to a sort of expansion of being that life restrains and that prudence checks.’

Deborah Hay has taken postmodern dance into various fields. After training with Merce Cunningham, she joined the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Subsequently she experimented in a variety of ways that led her to work with non-professional dancers and with dancers of all ages. In 2013, she became the first choreographer to present her methods – which are also set out in four books – on the interactive site Motion Bank.