Performance

Daniel Larrieu

Cold Song

Laurence Rondoni © Dean Inkster, 1992
Laurence Rondoni © Dean Inkster, 1992

30 & 31.03.23

CN D Pantin

The show will take place after the screening of Gravures by Daniel Larrieu

Daniel Larrieu’s Cold Song proposes a perforated and performed solo reading of these years of silence which the “AIDS years”, as they are commonly referred to, were for him. Larrieu considers himself as a survivor of the last “live in secret, live happy” generation in the midst of the storm of daily news and personal upheavals connected to the disappearance of loved ones; while showing great respect for the discretion which kept art and activism separate, the choreographer is animated by a sense of urgency to put the polymorphous violence of that era in perspective, and a necessity to transmit, through literary writing, a flow of emotions and a flux of interrogations. “The time has come to tell the story of this “darkening” of our lives”. As in an enigmatic and cathartic ritual, the artist interrogates from within the blanks of silence, the taboos, the unshared experiences and extreme notions of living with and dying with the disease, in a piece that brings together the dead and the living. 

Daniel Larrieu is one of the key protagonists of French contemporary dance. Dancer, choreographer and Tours CCN director (from 1994 to 2002), Larrieu has been developing for over 40 years a diverse array of creative projects within the Daniel Larrieu, Astrakan collection. His piece Chiquenaudes revealed the originality of his choreographic idiom and won second place in the Concours de Bagnolet in 1982. Since then, many other pieces have met with great success: Romance en Stuc, Bâtisseurs, Gravures... From 2004 onwards, he started working on a cycle of diverse and out-of-the-box performances and he has worked with many performing artists, such as Jérôme Marin for the "récital de chansons inadmissibles”, or a new staging of Jean Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs with Gloria Paris for her piece Divine. In 2019, he reprised Romance en Stuc and created a new choreographic tryptic, PAN PLIS PEAU which will premiere in the Fall of 2023.