DANCE ! creation documentary
Maya Balam Meyong, photo by Kyle Knodell
The disorder and imbalance of men as much as that of machines shame us. We plan to film the man incapable of controlling the evolutions. (Dziga Vertov)
It is fundamental to us to plead for a new engagement with reality which takes into account the incarnate character of our existence, and reconciles us with the world. (Matthew B. Crawford)
Our project was born from the desire to question our relationship with our bodies and our existence, particularly in an age marked by virtuality and distancing. The film asks: how can we reconnect with the physical world, with matter, and especially with our bodies, when everything seems increasingly dematerialized? For the filmmakers, dance represents that vital impulse, that drive which connects us to life, whether through matter, light, space, or the void.
Today the marriage to the machines has indeed taken place. Perhaps a bit too successfully, and isolates us from each other in the limbo of interfaces. What can we still experience that is truly profound? Is the world still touching us? Today, would it not be a new alliance with the body that should be made? Find the meaning of the world. In these strange Covid times, we need anchor points, we are eager for connections. But the real, the tangible, the here and now are out of reach.
We are all experiencing a crisis of sensitivity. The language of movement will allow us to exchange much more deeply on this subject than with words. A more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity.
The dancers are deprived of a stage. Deprived of an audience. They must reinvent their art. An art which no longer passes through the “exhibition”. But through the appropriation of other poetic means, the invention of other types of space, to nurture new forms of transmission. With the idea of rethinking, decomposing and recomposing an art in perpetual motion.
New, fertile artistic connections can thus be created. Not as an attempt to alleviate the frustration. Not as an exercise in capturing and transmitting. But as a means of opening the barriers and allowing possibilities to spring up in a dialogue where dance becomes film and film becomes dance.
Maya Balam Meyong, photo by Christopher Jones
There is dance as an artistic experience.
There is dance as a social experience.
Before that. Beyond that. At the same time. All over. All the time.
Dance is
AN EVIDENCE
A fundamental momentum
A life drive
A vital expression
Five dancers. Who do not know each other. Who have in common to feel, to go into ecstasies, to dance. Invite us on a sensitive and sensory journey to the heart of their art. Together, they will share what makes them dance. Will bring to life what drives them. With movement. With dancing. With words. In the exchange. They will forge links, body to body, soul to soul, create connections, conscious, unconscious, emotional, intellectual.
Together we will explore, experiment the art of dancing, the art of filming. Feeling how dance connects us to our body. How dance connects us to what makes us fundamentally alive: the light, the space, the time, the matter, the void.
“When I dance, I connect to matter, my feet on the ground, anchored to the earth. I perceive its density, its texture. I sink into it. I push myself away from it.”
“When I dance, I connect to light. It allows me to see the matter, to perceive and shape it. It is immaterial matter.”
“When I dance, I connect to space, in which matter and light take shape. In which all my perceptions reside. An imaginary body.”
“When I dance, I connect to time. If space is an imaginary body, time is a fictitious movement. (Paul Valéry). Duration, speed, repetition, suspension.”
“When I dance, I connect to the void. The void that begins from within me and contains all possibilities. The universe itself.”
They will dance because it is about life.
Make us want to live this language in our turn.