Due to Coronavirus and closing of theaters in Serbia, the show of Company 111 from Toulouse that was scheduled for 22nd March 2020. at Theater Atelje 212 is rescheduled for 6th November 2020. All tickets are valid for the new term.
aSH
with: Shantala Shivalingappa
and: Loïc Schild (percussions)
choreography: Shantala Shivalingappa
artistic collaboration: Taïcyr Fadel
light design: Arno Veyrat
music: Joan Cambon
set technical conception: Pierre Dequivre, Stéphane Chipeaux-Dardé
costumes: Manuela Agnesini
technical director: Thomas Dupeyron
stage manager: Robin Jouanneau
stage manager: Stéphane Ley
light manager: Mallory Duhamel
head of production: Florence Meurisse
production manager: Clément Séguier-Faucher
logistic manager: Estelle Castagnoli
photography: Aglaé Bory
duration: 60’
premiere: Festival Montpellier Danse, 2018
production: Compagnie 111 – Aurélien Bory
co-production: Théâtre de la Cité–CDN Toulouse Occitanie, Festival Montpellier Danse 2018, Agora PNAC Boulazac–Nouvelle-Aquitaine, La Scala–Paris, L’Onde Théâtre Centre d’Art–Vélizy-Villacoublay. With the artistic participation from ENSATT, Lyon.
Compagnie 111 –Aurélien Bory is under funding agreement with the Regional Directorate for Cultural Affairs Occitanie / French Ministry of Culture and Communication, Region Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée and the City council of Toulouse. It is supported by the Departmental Council of Haute-Garonne and the French Institute.
I met Shantala Shivalingappa in 2008, backstage at a theatre in Dusseldorf, where she was a guest of Pina Bausch. It was the last Drei wochen mit Pina festival. Shantala danced in “Nefes”, and this is where she saw “Plus ou moins l’infini”. It was here that everything came together in a hugely powerful way. It seemed almost unreal to me because so many elements significant to my path and that of Shantala converged at once. “aSH” is the final opus in the trilogy of portraits of women, after “Questcequetudeviens?” (2008) and “Plexus”(2012). In this trilogy, where I take as a starting point not space – which is my usual theme in theatre – but a woman, a person with a story; a living being who unfolds through dance. Shiva, god of dance, dwells in Shantala Shivalingappa. According to the texts, Shiva has over one thousand names. He is a god of creation and destruction. Lord of cremation grounds, he covers his body with ashes. Shantala Shivalingappa has constructed her dance in the image of this god, whose vibration keeps the beat of the world. I asked Shantala if she wanted to give the ash a try. Ash is not merely the solid residue of perfect combustion: it is here a process. It is part of a cycle of death and birth which begins from nothing, the start of any form in the theatre, and leans towards an ephemeral form before disappearing. Shantala’s dance resembles a kolam, a flour drawing made on the ground in the morning and destroyed by the wind during the day, and made again the following day. A geometry has embedded itself in her body through the movements of her Kuchipudi, repeated thousands of time. Circles, points, symmetries, spirals, fractals... her dance seems to be a representation of the very structure of the world. The way the syllables link together in Shantala Shivalingappa is a dance in itself. Shantala’s dance is created based on her journey from India to Europe, from Kuchipudi to Pina Bausch, from Shiva to Dionysus… Shantala between her birthplace Madras and Paris, where she lives. Her dance is a perpetual pendulum: somewhere between the Hindu mystique and quantum physics.
Aurélien Bory
Shantala Shivalingappa was trained in classical Indian dance at a tender age, in the Kuchipudi style. She had the privilege of working with some of the greatest artists of our times: Maurice Béjart, Peter Brook, Bartabas, Pina Bausch, Amagatsu. Today, internationally acclaimed as a rare dancer, she is an ambassador for Kuchipudi. She was the first to earn a Bessie Award in New-York (2013) for a South-Asian style, for her Kuchipudi solo “Shiva Ganga”.
Born in 1972 in Colmar, France, Aurélien Bory is a director and founder of Compagnie 111. He currently lives in Toulouse and works internationally. Before joining Le Lido, the Circus Arts Center of Toulouse, he studied physics in Strasbourg. After his training, he decided to join the company of Mladen Materic, Tatoo Theater, as an actor-performer. In 2000, he founded Compagnie 111. He develops a physical theatre singular and hybrid, a crossbreeding of different arts: circus, dance, theater, visual art and music.
The viewer will remember the splendid impact of what he has just witnessed for a long time afterwards.
Le Figaro
