Dancefloor
Dancefloor
Creation for 24 dancers of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine
Premiere on April 1st, 2023 at the Opéra national de Lorraine
Koo Jeong A, artist invited by the Centre Pompidou-Metz through the project "Artiste associé"
A corps de ballet consisting of 25 dancers
“For this new work, I decided to work with the full company of the Ballet de Lorraine, including all 25 dancers, experimenting with the effects of choreographing for such a large group.
One of the essential elements in my work is that the body is always the specific starting point, both subject and object of the piece to be created.
So each creation is built entirely on the individuals dancing in it and the subject of the work is the group of 25 dancers, who have all experienced the same research process and who are each unique individuals with their own training, experiences, stage presence and ideas.
The challenge is to use well the entire corps de ballet, while focusing on the indivuality of each performer – that’s the theme of Dancefloor.
About the title
The literal meaning of the word is “a stage or floor meant to be danced on,” but it also means “a space specifically set aside for dance.” I intend to use both meanings of the term here.
We begin with the spatial concept, the “stage for dance.”
We will be working with the expected rigor of a stage space, creating a score of dance themes, a sort of catalogue. Different tempi, rhythms, spaces, energies and shapes. Which means working with the second concept, the “dance floor.”
This space time event channels the night, a synonym for freedom and the expressivity of the bodies, a freer space – time, with significantly fewer constraints than during the day. We are seeking both the freedom and the expressivity of the bodies, the singularity of these individuals. Taking over this vast space – time with 25 bodies, flying free, overflowing with energy.
Dance, music, lighting, set and costumes.
As in all my work, the relationship between the dance, music, lighting, set and costumes is multiple, existing in parallel and independently, with mutual support, reciprocal service, conflicting – all cohabiting in the same space.
We hope to generate energy, share sensations and our experiences, between Dancefloor and its audience.
(c)Julien Reyes
Michèle Murray
MICHELE MURRAY is a choreographer and artistic director of the PLAY / Michèle Murray Company. A Franco-American national, she trained first in Düsseldorf in classical ballet , then in New York with Merce Cunningham and at Movement Research, later on with many teachers and choreographers in Paris before collaborating on various choreographic projects as a performer, notably with “l’art not least” in Berlin, Didier Théron in Montpellier and Bernardo Montet at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours. Since 2008, she has also been working as choreographic assistant with Didier Théron.
From 2000 onwards, she develops her personal work within the Michèle Murray Company, which becomes Murray / Brosch Productions in 2008, in artistic collaboration with Maya Brosch. She has created numerous works which have toured extensively in Europe .
In 2012, wishing to concentrate on projects dedicated primarily to dance and choreography, she founds PLAY / Michèle Murray, of which she is artistic director and choreographer, while researching in close collaboration with artist coworkers.
She creates the ATLAS / STUDIES, a “choreographic atlas” of ten short pieces for seven dancers, which is presented for the first time as a whole as part of the Festival Montpellier Danse 2018.
In 2020, she choreographs WILDER SHORES, a performance for six dancers with a musical composition by Gerome Nox for the Festival Montpellier Danse 2020.
She presented in 2022 EMPIRE OF FLORA, a choreography for four dancers and a DJ which premiered at the Montpellier Dance Festival.
In 2022, she also created DUOS – COLLISIONS AND COMBUSTIONS / A CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLECTION FOR THE MUSEUM, which premiered at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst- DKW Museum Cottbus on October 1-2, 2022, as part of the Dance in Residence Brandenburg program, Germany.
In April 2023, she will choreograph a dance piece for the 25 performers of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine.
Michèle Murray also teaches dance and performance art. Her teaching is closely linked to her choreographic research.
Koo Jeong A
The work of Koo Jeong A incorporates intersubjective phenomena, digital features and timely imaginaries with the capacity to transform into large-scale sculpture and painting, as well as film, animation, sound and scent, to reinvent the architectural space. The artist’s site-specific reconfigurations open up narrative portals, where the various media are combined with natural elements such as wind or gravity and the electromagnetic field. In this way, alternative realities are conjured not only geographically but also in an astral sense, tracing the poetry that permeates their unique universe.
As Frank Boehm has pointed out, Koo Jeong A works with a wide range of varying expressions and characters, who are part of an ongoing narrative that calls into play the idea of the ‘correlations’ of Friedrich Kiesler, relations between works, ideas and projects in various disciplines that are so close as to become interdependent.
The artist’s projects refract the viewer into different continents, states, personalities, and other forms of intelligence, drawing from a wide spectrum of concerns that has developed over the years, ranging from the human cognition that underpins our transient approach to our earthly environments and cosmic constellations that simultaneously connect and expand.
Koo Jeong A’s installation works trigger a regeneration and dynamism in the area in which they are situated. Projects like the Glow in the Dark Skatepark series are situated in the public arena and become part of the infrastructure of the city or the cultural destination in a wide collaboration with local citizens and governments that encourages different generations to create various communal events or attractions through autonomous self-organisation.
Koo Jeong A’s interest in the concept of the void also plays an important role. Installed in a site without the interaction of human beings, and affected only by the changing light of day and night, the large-scale sculptures still have depth of meaning, as if they are characters in time and space.
Art is seen by Koo Jeong A as a convergence with collective knowledge, and with the natural activities of life. To the artist, art is as an act of reverence that constantly incites the surprise of discovery, extending towards an unstoppable state of dynamism a perpetual becoming that is always oscillating, trembling and vibrating.