Umwelt
concept, design: Maguy Marin
music design: Denis Mariotte
lighting design: Alexandre Béneteaud
sound design: Loic Goubet
set design: Michel Rousseau
costume design: Cathy Ray, with Chantal Cloupet & Aurora Van Dorsselaer
duration: 70’
premiere: Le Toboggan, Décines, 2004 & 2021
co-production: Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape/ Compagnie Maguy Marin, Le Théâtre de la ville (Paris), Le Toboggan de Décines , La Maison de la danse de Lyon, Teatro Rivoli do Porto
The Company Maguy Marin is supported by Ministry of Culture and Communication (General direction for artistic creation, Dance Delegation). The Company is subsidized by City of Lyon, Region Auvergne- Rhône-Alpes, and supported by the French Institute for the international projects.
That’s where we are. Inventorying what is possible. Toying with the possible without achieving it. Going to the exhaustion of possibilities. An exhaustion that renounces any order of preference and any organization of purpose or meaning. We don’t prefer one over the other. We don’t achieve any more, even though we continue to accomplish. And it’s because we won’t stop wanting to live, not only be born, to experiment, not only observe, that we extricate ourselves from the complexity. So that the complexity becomes multiplicity. So that the world is no longer complex, but multiple – plural. A multiplicity where the exhaustion of that which is possible composes. Gives rhythm. A multiplicity filled with uninterrupted movements, with accelerating, with releasing. Constant alterations which give us the joy of the unpredictable. The joy of giving ourselves the potential to act. The joy of living our capabilities for transformation. We’re not made once and forever. We don’t know what a life – or a body – can do or be? We don’t know what postures and positions will spread from our interferences (external and internal)? Positions, postures, accidents, dissonances, steps and paths, approaches, exhaustive positions setting off in diverse directions. Too much to do with a possible more and more restricted to care about what is still happening. Create the possible as one carries it out. Exhaust the potentialities of a motif by composition, decomposition, and re-composition of variations, successions, and juxtapositions, in a continuous flow: fugue and canon. Spaces formed and deformed, constructed and deconstructed, among themselves. Fragmentations and possible combinations without object. Populated, traveled spaces. Unstable construction, where the encountered singularity extends itself into the proximity of another. A construction step by step. A construction from the center of things. Catching a glimpse of the porosities. Again stating the necessity of addressing others, of the appeal of the indefinite. “Others” as the “possible worlds” to which movements and objects confer an always variable reality. Others who have no other reality than that which their voice gives them in their possible world, and who are in themselves “stories” and “histories”.
Maguy Marin
One of the most significant figures in the French new wave, dancer, choreographer, and company director, Maguy Marin, was born in Toulouse in 1951. After studying dance in her native Toulouse she began performing with the Strasbourg Opera Ballet. Later, she moved to Brussels to continue her studies at Béjart's Mudra School. She joined his Ballet of the XX Century in 1974, and slightly later made her first choreography for that company. In 1978 she won first prize at the Bagnolet Choreographic Competition. The same year, she founded her own company, which was renamed Company Maguy Marin, in 1984. She was resident choreographer at Lyon Opera Ballet (1991-1993). In addition to making unforgettable performances for her own company, Marin has choreographed pieces for the Paris Opera Ballet and Dutch National Ballet. A list of her other works includes numerous titles that had fantastic success in France, but also around the world.
One of the strongest and most impressive shows in this decade.
© Libération
A masterful piece !
© Le Nouvel Obs
