Rachid Ouramdane

The brief, infinitive the title of this latest piece by Rachid Ouramdane, co-director of the Centre choréographique national de Grenoble, gives us an idea of the project’s guiding sense of purity and sparseness. We are presented with a white stage set, cast shadows, and two dancers, Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer. On it, the two dancers create a torsion which is as physical as it is perceptive of their image - simultaneously offsetting the course of the movement and the way it is seen. In conceiving these juxtaposed solos, Rachid Ouramdane has moved away from the documentary lyricism of his last works in order to concentrate solely on the singularity of the movement of these two performers. After working alongside him on Sfumato and POLICES !, in particular, their work together digs deep into the source of movement, extracting from it a concentration of physicality which reveals the subjective contours of the two women: what are the forces that spring them into movement, or drive them? Away from the representation of the body as spectacle, TORDRE takes us in the direction of a very different, more intimate, measure in time: a sort of infra-dance, based on interior impulses from which glimpses of a whole relationship with the world emerge. Since childhood, Lora Juodkaite has been developing her own practice of gyration, a spiraling which comforts and isolates her from the rest of the world. She spins, tirelessly, carving out endless variations which in turn shift the centres of gravity. As for Annie Hanauer, the internal logic of her dance is redefined by her relationship with a false arm - part-extension part-pendulum, and which intensifies her onstage presence. By turns powerful and fragile, their bodies bear witness to what they are going through and what is going through them: two logics on a knife-edge, rubbing against against each other, colliding, and searching to bind themselves to what lies outside...