After a blank year, the Montpellier dance festival is celebrating its 41st edition with, as we wrote, a very “heart-to-target” refocusing desired by its director Jean-Paul Montanary.
We saw five shows there, and missed that of Sylvain Huc who refused that we film an extract.
Let's start with the creation of Jann Gallois at the Bagouet studio of the Agora, which is fortunate to be supported by the BNP Paribas foundation.
This excellent dancer concocts her choreographies like a “fusion” chef does her recipes.
This gives rise to a curious mixture: gestures punctuated by Japanese drums, followed by illustrations on 18th and 20th century music, and finally mimes stuck in a sort of metal roller fixed to the ground.
Read also: Montpellier Danse 2021, a very contemporary 41st edition
In the beautiful Agora theater, Maud Le Pladec wants to forge links between music and dance, which is characteristic of the art of choreography. Except that here the vocal performers are also the dancers, otherwise excellent. Thus, the physical prowess that the artists accomplish on stage excuse the sometimes approximate accuracy of the song. The whole is a nice dialogue between two languages: that of the song and that of the body. But from there to understanding "the becoming feminist in the history of music" there is a step that, I confess, I have not succeeded in taking.
The next day, we attended what was to be one of the events of the Festival, the creation of Sharon Eyal, THE most prominent choreographer at the moment. This artist who advocates freedom of the body and of movement is so fashionable that fashion has come to her: Maria Grazia Chiuri requested her presence for her Dior shows. This aura, which extends far beyond the simple circle of choreography, sheds light on the many similarities between Sharon Eyal's creative process and that of a haute-couture designer. Eyal manages everything at the last minute and his works evolve with the constant concern to stay at the very forefront of novelty.
"Fashion and dance are very connected, it's the same '' feeling ''",
explains this reluctant artist to interviews.She wants to be in the
“Dynamic of the arts”
because
“whether in dance, fashion or plastic art, everything is a question of time, rhythm, quantity”
. For her,
"fashion, dance, circus, everything is completed and everything comes together"
.
Chapter 3, the Brutal Journey of the Heart
, is an almost autobiographical piece as it draws the portrait of an anxious and self-centered designer. Very linear and monotonous, the work aims to highlight the contrast between the artifice of a fashion show and the natural presence of bodies in their freedom of movement. The demonstration is accentuated by a dance performed almost exclusively on demi-pointes. (Poor dancers!)
Another highly anticipated moment of the festival, the creation of Papaioannou in a Corum that was not filling up. If this Greek artist is a star in the world of dance, the public does not know it yet.
Transverse Orientation
is more the work of a scenographer than that of a choreographer. The show is a series of superb paintings: the Minotaur, the revisited Savoyard chimney sweeps, the bullfight, Eve's ride receiving the forbidden fruit…. But the dance in all of this? Totally absent! It is undoubtedly very beautiful but unfortunately very long - 1h45. Proof of the lack of humility of an artist sure of himself, persuaded to have the right note and to hover above the fray.
Finally, without a doubt, the most applauded show of the 41st Montpellier Danse festival was rightly that of Angelin Preljocaj who knew how to touch the spectators with the mixture of dance and intelligence, inspired by a class that the earthy Gilles Deleuze gave in the Eighties on
the Ethics
of Spinoza, and while mixing with the words of the thinker, sometimes very serious, sometimes funny, the roars of the guitar of Jimi Hendrix.