Maguy Marin
Umwelt
© Philippe Grappe ©
© Philippe Grappe ©
Conception, Maguy Marin
With 9 performers
Sound and music installations, Denis Mariotte
Lighting design, Alexandre Béneteaud
Costumes, Nelly Geyres
Sound design, Antoine Garry
Assistant, Cathy Polo
Coproduction 2013, House on Fire ; théâtre Garonne – Scène européenne (Toulouse), BIT – Teatergarasjen (Bergen – Norway), Kaaitheater (Brussels) ; Compagnie Maguy Marin
Coproduction 2003, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris ; Maison de la Danse (Lyon) ; Le Toboggan (Décines) ; Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape / Compagnie Maguy Marin // In partnership with Théâtre de la Ville ; Festival d’Automne à Paris (for performances from 4 to 8 December)
In partnership with Maison des Arts Créteil ; Festival d’Automne à Paris (for performances on 9 and 10 October) // 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 30 November 2004 at Toboggan, Centre culturel de Décines
In association with France Inter
Maguy Marin’s work breaks free from all codes and formal constraints in order to invent new onstage forms in which music, text, theatre and dance confront and question each other mutually. From May B. to BiT, presented at last year’s Festival d’Automne, each of her works looks upon the body, voice, time, and stage as matter to be harmonized, twisted or interwoven. In 2003, more than 30 years after her first production, she presented Umwelt, the radical nature of which shook the very foundations of performance to the core - plunging audiences deep into a tumultuous vision with bodies grappling with time, and struggling with their self-image in the midst of an unstable and chaotic environment. Ten years later, this choreographic force to be reckoned with has lost none of her percussive impact.
Umwelt, conceived as an environment with rules of its own, makes use of perceptive staging composed of doors and mirrors, openings and closures, and which organize our fleeting vision. Within this vibrating framework, made possible by the amplified sound of three guitars, moving bodies go back and forth, appear, disappear, and embark on instants of everyday existence. They might brandish an object, hug, walk, eat or disappear. This uninterrupted suite of entries and exists builds up a gallery-like array of different attitudes and postures - like a random roll of film inserted into a faulty projector. The machine gradually starts to go out of control, cuts out, repeats itself and then starts up again. The different bodies in the space split apart, repeat themselves, positioned on the brink of their own existences. Like a catalogue of ephemeral beings, or a “user guide for life” which will continue its search until “the running out of all possibles”, Umwelt hollows out the future of our own environment - in all its vanity and fragility.
In the same place
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In this breakthrough piece for Jan Martens, VOICE NOISE brings together six dancers to shape a soundscape comprising some of the great female performers and composers of our time. In his own pop-inspired and precise way, the choreographer questions a very contemporary story, and in doing so raises the question of how some of these voices were silenced.