Out of time. Promise of the World 2024dancer Solal Mariotte offered an original rewriting of his solo Collages/Ravages, which questions the place of virility and sexism in dance, to open the festival on Friday, September 20. The inhabited performance of the 22-year-old virtuoso from hip-hop and breakdancing was punctuated by the percussive rhythm of drummer Lucas Messler. In 2025, Solal Mariotte will work on a duet with the great Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Deconstruction. In 2019, the New Museum of Moscow offers Ukrainian artist Olga Dukhovnaya to choreograph Swan Lake for thirty-two dancers, an orchestra and singers. After two years of pandemic, the war in Ukraine finally gave the project the final blow. The choreographer then concentrated the entire corps de ballet in that of a single performer. At the festival on Friday evening, with her partner Stanley Menthor, her Swan Lake Solo made the forecourt vibrate. In a political gesture, to denounce this Swan Lake that the former USSR broadcast on a loop on all channels each time a general secretary of the communist party died.
Heat. A great traveler and passionate about musical encounters, musician Amina Mezaache and her Brazilian jazz group Maracuja took festival-goers on a colorful travel diary filled with the richness of Brazilian, African and jazz cultures. Under the lights of the Arch of Worldthe crowd in the square is then teleported into the dream world of the flautist who closes the concert with a tribute to “HP”for Hermeto Pascoal, composer of the Brazilian avant-garde, one of his main inspirations. In the album Vortex, the quartet Maracuja explores the shimmering universe of music from the Brazilian Northeast, samba, carnival, where each rhythm tells its own story, from Rio to Manaus, passing through the dusty roads of Conakry, all tinged with jazz experiments.
Future. Funky and techno bass concluded a very rhythmic opening night of the Festival du Monde. The DJ duo, Club 2050, offered a three-hour set, opening with the Olympic anthem in electro version. Olivier Clairouin, head of the Pixels department at the newspaper, and his accomplice on stage, Arthur Nancel, intend to mix music and ecology to imagine the “party of the future”. Their idea: that “night fever” does not rhyme with climate hangover, Club 2050 donates the profits from its services to associations fighting for the preservation of the environment. Better to set the dance floor on fire than the planet!
