Air
2013
Air is a choreography for two sounding bodies in a dialogue with a quartet of singers.
The audience is positioned in between the singers and dancers, in the exact location where the dialogue takes place, in a similar way to the central role of the coryphaeus in Greek theatre.
Air pursues all of the quivering of the air within that mutual respiratory area in order to find a unique place for the body of sound which is neither a concert, nor a speech or theatrical.
A new organic force which would make it closer to an opera in which the libretto would be that of the movement of sound and the ballet as its narrative structure. A mini opera or “chamber opera” in which the challenge would be to link it to its source and therefore to the question of sacrifice and the trance which accompanies it.
Air was inspired by the short film by Jean Rouch Les tambours d’avant for which the ethnologist film maker went to a village in Niger in order to film a possession ritual which took its time in coming, he started to film his last sequence shot. The drums stopped, he continues filming and then, in front of the gathered village, an old woman wrapped in a blanket, begins a possession dance. It is at this point where he chooses for a tracking out, leaving us to imagine the dance. I imagined the woman’s dance in front of the assembled village and the challenge facing her at that moment, beyond her age, to reveal something fundamental with her body and her voice.
Air tries perhaps to find out where it lies for us, today, this trance generated by the glances of others, and in the message that it could convey.