Maguy Marin

Voices, faces and bodies emerge from a thick paste, driven by an inner tension which sends vibration throughout the space. For more than 30 years, Maguy Marin’s work as a choreographer has been to draw “a path that walks” (Paul Klee). Her perseverance brings us to the words of Samuel Beckett: “Try better. Fail again. Fail better”. For her, dance is never any one given state, but rather the result of a wrenching away from, or struggle with and against, the shapeless. From May B to Cap au pire and Description d’un combat, Maguy Marin develops a form of dance open to theatre and music, and in which the spoken word works and kneads the flesh, propelling it in accordance with its scansions and images.

For this latest creation, Maguy Marin returns to a fundamental question - that of rhythm - sets about working on it from the starting point of a quotation by the linguist Émile Benveniste: “Rhythm is the shape of a given instant that is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid. Rhythm is improvised, momentary and alterable”. Rather than a cadence, rhythm thus becomes a form of musicality generated by bodies moving around in the space, an unquantifiable measure which precedes all will or intention. It is a bringing together of imperceptible marks or strikes which “signal a way of being with time”. In order to encapsulate something of this flow, Maguy Marin began working in a way which focused as much on inner as on spatial elements, and during which different points in the future are blended together, allowing their convergences and defeats to resound throughout the space. The outcome is a vast movement of differing speeds, slowness, jolts, and intertwined intensities, setting forth the imprint for possible co-existence. From it we can hear the echo of Henri Meschonnic’s words: “If we are talking about rhythm, then I am talking about you. You are the one who is talking, and so the problems of rhythm are yours”.