The new show of the Belgian choreographer received, on Tuesday, a supported reception of the 1,900 spectators present at the Palais des Papes.
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And what will happen now? The darkness has just completely engulfed the courtyard of the Palais des Papes and we are still on the lookout, awaiting the continuation. This pleasure of suspense, the one who mysteriously holds on alert, is there with the near future, a new opus of the Belgian choreographer Jan Martens. Constantly unarken, this show for fifteen dancers from the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen d’Antvers and two teenage girls never look alike. If he sometimes seems to abandon you, it is because he lets you breathe but does not let go. And it is in this moving, uncertain in-between, that the fascination operated by the room is loved.
A year after the overflowing success of Any Attempt Will End in Crushed Bodies and Shattered Bones, on the concerto for harpsichord and strings op. 40, by Henryk Gorecki, presented in the courtyard of the Lycée Saint-Joseph, nearby future Received, Tuesday, July 19, a supported reception but perhaps slightly perplexed by the 1,900 spectators present. Without doubt the versatility of the different paintings, between dance, video and performance, she also explains this slower membership of the public. If we note a few common points between the two shows such as the gestural signatures proposed by each of the performers, the sequence of walking revised spatial geometry or even the projections of sentences with political content, the second risks distempt the spring Narrative: Martens launches an invitation to share his world but encloses anyone.
The harpsichord is the nervous center of this creation for which Martens has selected six contemporary works. Highly singular and complex, they are played live by the Polish Goska Isphording, a student of the famous Elisabeth Chojnacka (1939-2017) whose video in concert has capsized the choreographer. Pop, it becomes melted with harpsichord. He also installs the instrument in the middle of the scene, claiming to get him out of the margin and the forgetfulness where he seems condemned. He encrusts it in the hollow of a huge bench which punctuates and underlines the 37 meters in width and opening of the tray by delimiting two planes.
This soberly unusual scenography serves first for what it is: a place where the dancers arise, also rest by taking the enormous measure of where they are. Sports, relaxed and multicolored, they make up a fresco of frank and direct beauty in the introduction, surrounding Goska Isphording before attacking. The bench then transforms into a huge coil around which the movement wraps and panics. The swirling race of the dancers caught in the turbo of the scathing sounds of the harpsichord spins the dizzy. Visions of racing fields or arena appear and disappear while the performers explode in front and behind the bench. Whether they appear fully visible or the legs cut, in small groups or each in their corner, their drunkenness in a loop takes 500 square meters of the tray as a playground.
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