Radical, committed, the creations presented this year at the opening of the Montpellier Danse festival are dazzling. Three of them mark the return of some of the most admired and followed masters: the South African Robyn Orlin, the English Wayne McGregor and the Japanese Saburo Teshigawara. Often trivialized by clips, social networks, fashion or advertising, contemporary dance remains, on stage, a discipline apart, unstoppable in constructing without words complex, poetic, learned if not sacred visual universes. This is the stated purpose of Montpellier Danse and its director for forty-one years, Jean-Paul Montanari: in a world saturated with accelerated and virtualized images, where entertainment rules and leaves the imagination at the dock, art remains an essential act of resistance.
Culinary festivals: to see and eat
And if Robyn Orlin takes us to a specific and violent place in her country – Namaqualand, a mining region abandoned after years of relentless exploitation – it is precisely to transform this abrupt reality into a multicoloured dream. How in Salts Desert Is It Possible to Blossom… (“How can one flourish in a salt desert?”), informs us, in a preamble on screen, of this mining and working-class past. However, what he gives us to see on stage is quite different, full of childish joy and angry, joyful confusion. Two musicians from Johannesburg accompany five dancers “ coloured » (mixed race) from this mining region, all decked out in brightly colored tinsel. Their invigorating fantasy recalls the singer Camille, with whom Robyn Orlin likes to collaborate. Together they celebrate life, laugh, tease each other, have fun filming themselves and revealing their personalities. Magic of video with live special effects, their whirling, by turns mischievous or dramatic, draws giant kaleidoscopes in the background of the stage, immense flowers born from chaos…
In DeepstariaWayne McGregor’s creation, the excess appears more ordered, more disturbing. The choreographer invites us to explore an enigmatic world, a ” black hole “ perhaps liquid, or stellar… In a studied twilight, the dancers interact in constant resonance with a series of striking sounds created by Oscar-winning sound engineer Nicolas Becker… Alternating grace and gravity with precision, their dance grammar therefore takes on the dimension of a dystopia on the borders of abstraction. Virtuoso, steeped in classical technique, she takes on new movements along the way evoking connections, algorithms, questioning in passing the place of physics and digital technology in our life, central while these notions border on the inexplicable almost unrepresentable, and yet here challenged by McGregor. Bach music, distant thunder, moving lights. Saburo Teshigawara also offers a waking dream, a dark, hypnotic and captivating picture. « Voice of Desert draws, through the body, our inner voices”, indicates the choreographer. At the height of their technique and their cutting edge, the bodies here pass without transition from the purest slow motion to the most virtuoso velocity, conjuring up ghosts that install fear and then untie it. This fight with the unconscious and the beyond evokes Japanese butoh, a dance called “of the dark body” where introspection and movement create sparks.
Montpellier Danceuntil July 6. montpellierdanse.com
