Bouchra Ouizguen
OTTOF
Artistic Direction, Bouchra Ouizguen
Singers, dancers, Kabboura Aït Hmad, El Hanna Fatéma, Halima Sahmoud,
Fatna Ibn El Khatyb, Bouchra Ouizguen
Lighting, Eric Wurtz
Music, Lutosławski - Preludes and Fugue for 13 solo Strings, Nina Simone - My Baby Just Cares For Me
A Compagnie O production
In coproduction with Festival Montpellier Danse ; Festival d’Automne à Paris ; Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Belgium) ; La Bâtie – Festival de Genève ; Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle de l’Ambassade de France au Maroc
In partnership with Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from l’Institut Français de Marrakech // With support from Arcadi
This show is part of the Parcours d’auteurs cultural and artistic education programme, a joint initiative between the Festival d’Automne and the SACD
First performed on 25 June 2015 at the Festival Montpellier Danse
Each different, but all in unison, Bouchra Ouizgen’s ladies steadfastly furrow their paths. They carve out a space at the crossover between tradition and the everyday, condensing or elongating it to the sound of their songs, laughter and whispers. As artists accustomed to performing for distracted, sometimes entranced audiences at weddings and cabarets, they know how to make their rhythm felt, and mark out their terrain. Bouchra Ouizgen’s disturbing witches, or hard-working ants, as the case may be, carry out artistic research which is radically anchored in the present. Kabboura Aït Ben Hmad, El Hanna Fatéma, Halima Sahmoud and Fatna Ibn El Khatyb form the core members of compagnie O, the first three of whom we saw in Madame Plaza, and then in Ha !.
In the latter work, dressed in white headscarves, the dark background bringing out the sharp lines of their throats and heads, they embarked upon a choreography of sighs, necklines, shrieks, and head shaking. In Les Corbeaux, seventeen women of all ages gave themselves over to the experience of this primordial trance, shaking the branches of a tree with its roots deep in the ground. This journey, between underground and surface, is akin to the one carried out by ants (or ottof in the Berber language).
In her latest creation, Bouchra Ouizgen entreats her four accomplices to dig channels, and to drain and renew the ground that they have been treading together for eight years now. In doing so, they prolong and deepen this unique, radical, human and artistic adventure.
In the same place
Mathilde Monnier Territoires
In Territoires, Mathilde Monnier will be taking over the galleries of the Centre Pompidou during the course of a weekend in order to bring us a piece that deals with memory and circulation, "a collection of gestures from her work over the past thirty years". In doing so, the choreographer sets up the possibility of playing out memory in the present, from now onwards, or by means of anticipation.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Complete retrospective of films and videos
Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents the complete retrospective of his films at the Centre Pompidou. It consists of his eight feature films, thirty or so short (and rare) films, various collective works, and two feature films produced by him.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Night Particles
The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is guest at the Festival d'Automne and Centre Pompidou. His exhibition, featuring around ten video installations, transforms the former solarium into a nocturnal space inhabited by biographical and architectural reminiscences.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul A Conversation with the Sun (VR), extended edition
The Thai filmmaker's second foray into performance art, A Conversation with the Sun (VR), extended edition, presented in Paris in a new version enhanced by a third part, uses virtual reality to create the conditions for a collective dream.
Ligia Lewis Still Not Still
In Still Not Still, choreographer Ligia Lewis pursues her exploration into the silences and shadows of history. In this piece, the performers play out a score over and over again, the burlesque dimension of which makes it all the more tragic.
Forced Entertainment Signal to Noise
Over its forty years of existence, with Tim Etchells at the helm, the company has never stopped reinventing itself. And it continues to do so. Amidst an oscillating form of virtual reality, six performers find themselves deprived of their voices and their entire beings. The whole thing goes beyond all understanding... Welcome to this new world.
Sébastien Kheroufi Par les villages
Sébastien Kheroufi discovered Peter Handke's Par les villages at the onset of his artistic career. It evokes a writer's return to his native village. Amidst the twilight setting in which one universe declines in favour of another, the voices of the “offended and humiliated” break their silence.