Ecran somnambule - Solo by Latifa Laâbissi
Ecran somnambule - Solo by Latifa Laâbissi
Based on the film Mary Wigman tanzt (1930), an excerpt of La Danse de la sorcière (Hexentanz, 1926)
Production : Figure Project
A compact block in the middle of the bare space. A face, impassible, grimacing. An immobile sculpture which then seems to move, stretch, contract, extend itself to its very limits. Is this an apparition? Or a reproduction? A case of possession? A dream or a projection? By choosing to dance a massively slowed down version of Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance, Latifa Laâbissi presents us with a mirage, changing the status of this "historic" object, blurring the lines of interpretation. This was a major work in the history of German expressionism, but its only trace now is a tiny fragment, which continues to haunt the dance unconscious like a bad dream: a film lasting only a minute and 40 seconds, dating from 1926, which shows Mary Wigman in a near-trance, her limbs appearing electrified, reacting to the muffled rhythms of the percussion. This aesthetic of contrast, of abrupt rupture, in which the body becomes the conduit for contradictory states—how do we restore to the work its disturbing potential without mummifying it? Only reproducing what is shown in the images of the film, Latifa Laâbissi slips inside the body of the witch, altering the stage space into a hypnotic state in which each movement reveals its slow construction. A truly cinematographic operation—the slo-mo reveals another vocabulary at its very surface: it introduces a certain distance to the original, while also accentuating its bas-relief, the extreme tension of this disturbing figure. Is this the incarnation of a film or the reproduction of a body? The discordant silhouette is both material and archive, witch and ghost, presence and medium, producing an interesting series of gaps—perceptual as well as historical—leading us to rethink the relationship of the dance to its reproduction, its history, its zones of repression. Écran somnambule: a projectionist’s surface where shapes and references are shown, interior monsters and fragments of reality—in a constant back-and-forth between past and present, lifting spells and reactivation.
Duration: 32 minutes
Hors d'oeuvre
The CCN – Ballet de Lorraine invites you to experience the work of several choreographers who will be working with the company this season. These more intimate events, presented at our studios in Nancy, will allow you to see a whole other side of these artists, to see their work with the dancers in a different way. It’s a sort of sidestep, a teaser, a different taste.
Fee: 15€ / reduced fee* : 10€ (limited seats available - booking advised)
Latifa Laâbissi
Mixing genres, redefining formats, the creations of Latifa Laâbissi bring onstage a special kind of off camera layering of figures and voices.
The use of voice and the face as vehicles for certain states became irrevocably entwined with the danced act in Self-portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Then, continuing her examination of the theme of archive, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite (2012), based on German dance of the 20s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016), cosigned with the set designer Nadia Lauro, consists of visions, landscapes and images in which we see excess, the monstrous, the beautiful, the random, the comic and fear. Since 2011, Latifa Laâbissi has been the Artistic Director of Extension Sauvage, an artistic and pedagogical program located in rural areas of Brittany.
In 2016, a monographic book about her whole work is published at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she creates with Antonia Baehr, Consul & Meshie, a simian performance in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro. They also gather, in 2019 for the video Moving Backwards by the duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale.
On Summer 2019, the Festival de Marseille welcomes the premières of her last creation, White Dog, a choreography for 4 performers. And until 2019, she is an Associate Artist at the CCN2 – Centre chorégraphique national in Grenoble and at the Triangle – scène conventionnée danse à Rennes.