Two generations of choreographers with crossing, but yet very different artistic paths share in our first program of the season, Loïc Touzé with NO OCO and Maud le Pladec with STATIC SHOT. Even after the over 200 creations this company has produced throughout the years, with each new creation the “naratives” get created and the anticipation mounts  and mounts for the premier, the lights dim. What awaits? 

For Loïc Touzé’s piece NO OCO the collaborative process is utterly intertwined with the final form. Loïc plunges into the hollow of a studio - a place of ritual of study of heightened sensibilities. In close dialog with the dancers he explores how a gesture becomes the collective experience, harvesting the rhythm that allows the passage of movement to dance. Stepping into the world of Maud Le Pladec is to enter an intense place ceaseless in its corporeal and choreographic research. For STATIC SHOT she explores a cinematographic form that uses a fixed frame shot, in which movement and what is seen never stops. Exploring the notion of pleasure and ecstasy the performers bodies are plunged into a sort of continued state of climax.

NO OCO ^(creation)

Loïc Touzé

«When I was quite young I began dancing with the Paris Opera Ballet; I left when I was a young adult, feeling I was escaping a forest of movements and gestures to move more toward dance. That journey has now lasted over thirty years, and I’ve lost my way a few times, been overwhelmed, I doubted some of my choices – and I learned to find and to recognize the subtle spaces where dance really happens. I understood that dance often happens in one particular situation – when the dancer pulls back, as though there’s not enough space onstage for the dance and the dancer at the same time. This paradox is, for a performer, the most difficult thing to cope with. 

Encountering the dancers of the CCN Ballet de Lorraine, creating a piece with them, will be like returning to the forest and the beginning of my journey. I remember the words of Gilles Deleuze: ‘The forest is not defined by a shape, instead it is defined by its power, the power to make its trees grow, until it can go no further.’ My only question for that forest is not: what is your shape, what is your delineation? My only question is therefore: what is your power? Meaning: how far will you go? 

Creating a dance means dealing with something larger than the self, making our movements active and empowering, inventing a destination, reaching somewhere or someone. It also involves taking a leap outside the self, risking hesitation, wavering, clumsiness. Once they have been created, what happens to these dances, where do they go? Will they continue to affect people, events, ideas? 

Before setting a subject, a theme or an idea, I need to meet the dancers who will be performing the piece we will be creating together. There are of course a few precursor thoughts, this idea of Antiphon the sophist. the arrythmiston, meaning the unarranged, the unformed, something free of structure, that which is the most fundamental in a being, the passive material which receives the rhythm. 

This is where we will find the musicality of the work, in the hollow space which we will create so that a movement will come to fill it. From our exchanges the dances will be created, we will follow them, tuning them to each other and building the piece.» 

Loïc Touzé

Coproduction with ORO

Static Shot ^(creation)

Maud Le Pladec

«STATIC SHOT is my next choreographic project for the dancers of the Ballet de Lorraine. This work which will premiere in 2020 is based on an amazing artistic experience I had for the first time a few months ago: dance and film together. The director Valérie Donzelli invited me to participate and collaborate on her feature, “Notre-Dame,” a danced fiction which will be released next season. The experience fascinated me both personally and artistically, but I hadn’t imagined how much this encounter would reveal a new and pressing desire for me to explore my practice through the 7th art, but without – for example – projecting images during my pieces. No, it’s on a sensitive, conceptual and intellectual level that this all hit me; the resonances of this new aesthetic experience allowed me to begin a new reflection about the body and its representations, but also to continue my research into danced movement.» 

Maud Le Pladec

Coproduction with CCN d'Orléans