A mechanical piece

Une pièce mécanique in French

Conception and choreography: Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau.
Visual creation: Dominique Blais.
Musical creation: Damien Poncet.
Lights: Arnaud Koseleff.
Object management: Charles-Edouard Maisonabe.
Computer programming: David Olivari, Stéphanie Le Fresne, Maël Teillant.
Objets creation: Matthieu Audejean, Delphine Dupuy, Charles-Edouard Maisonabe.
Dancers: Alexandre Da Silva, Simon Nemeth, Laurie Peschier-Pimont

When the dancer Loïe Fuller asked herself “What is dance?”, she answered “It is movement”.

Playing with this postulate, Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau divert the process of choreographic composition by applying it simultaneously to two dancers and to a “mechanical ballet body”. The challenge is to experiment what kind of dance can be created and to confront the presence of the dancers with that of moving objects.

For this project, the visual artist Dominique Blais has designed a set of mobile stage sculptures, playing with a black/white binarity and kinetic effects. These objects are also endowed with their own sound score and create, by their movements, a spatialisation of the musical composition created by Damien Poncet.

The digital technologies participate in the scenic proposal; they enrich the function of the interpreter, a founding element of the live performance, in a face to face with the objects.

 

 

Une Pièce démontée

Une Pièce démontée, A Disassembled part in English, is the version of the “mechanical corps de ballet” alone.

This piece seizes on the presence of “almost living” movement and makes it a performance issue. For the philosopher Leibniz, “life is a machine of machines”. This choreography questions the status of the dancer, absent here, as well as that of movement. Une Pièce démontée is a piece about looking. It invites to a daydream of the spectator walker. It plays with physics and with matter. It is a dance of intervals and offers itself a “mechanoscene”.

Coproduction: Centre national de la danse – Pantin (création en résidence), Biennale de Danse du Val-de-Marne / CDC, Ville de Champigny-sur-Marne. 
With the support of: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Dicréam ; Conseil général du Val-de-Marne ; Ville de Paris ; ADAMI, Mains d’œuvres (Saint-Ouen) ; l’Etoile du Nord (Paris) ; micadanses (Paris)