With its resolutely sentimental title, the festival Le Temps d’aimer la danse, on the bill until September 16 in different locations in Biarritz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) and seventeen cities in the Basque Country, is starting the new school year gently and with open arms. Thirty-four years that the event, led by choreographer Thierry Malandain, director of the Ballet Biarritz, has maintained its fervor intact for all styles and genres. Contemporary, flamenco, hip-hop, traditional dances, the menu plays yo-yo without leaving one’s appetite. “And that’s the right recipe here to continue to arouse people’s curiosity and give them a change of scenery when they want it.”assures Malandain, happy to announce that ticket sales have been stormed since June and that the theatres are full.
The 2024 edition, featuring thirty-nine companies of all sizes, including the impressive Ballets de Berne, Marseille and Monte-Carlo, opened with a volley of contrasting and electrifying proposals. At the Théâtre du Colisée in Biarritz, the young Korean artist Sun-A Lee unfolds the three parts of Cover Piecesa ritualized quest on the announced theme of healing. Between goat mask, clay and water, surrounded by three accomplices, she risks slowness and interiority.
In a more tormented mode, the Spanish choreographer and breaker of Japanese origin Akira Yoshida delivers with Burial of the Barkan existential fable about solitude and wandering. A suitcase on wheels and a child’s chair are the only supports of the male character who struggles in the void. Regularly surrounded by darkness, Akira Yoshida gives full meaning to a fluid and nervous hip-hop whose jolts and twists accurately tell the story of defeat and pain.
The art of being in a relationship
On the contrary, under the title of Fantasy minorthe Portuguese Marco da Silva Ferreira sets in motion a playful and clever mechanism for the dancers Chloé Robidoux and Anka Postic, real living springs. In the open air, near the beach, on a square of 4 meters by 4, this short and fast piece explodes the hip-hop, contemporary and classical registers on the music Fantasy in F minorthe Schubert.
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At the Théâtre Michel-Portal in Bayonne, the curiously titled duo Crocodileby Martin Harriague with Emilie Leriche, actually has very soft skin. Framed by two marimba players, whose elastic sounds lift the bodies, the dancers decline the attraction of love in an astonishing range of colors. At first distant, then in contact, intertwined with each other, they converse according to a score of movements as inventive as it is voluble. The leg of one dialogues with the arm of the other, a neck shakes which makes a knee tremble from a distance, a face is embedded in the hands of its partner… Echoes and variations, this light and magical ping-pong gives rise to a marvelous mikado, whose abstraction is surrounded by tenderness. Geometry is put at the service of the art of being in a couple and it is a treat. With this piece, which brought the audience to their feet, Martin Harriague, who has been noticed for five years and has recently been appointed director of the Ballet de l’Opéra Grand Avignon, imposes his writing.
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