Gisèle Vienne
Crowd
© Estelle Hanania ©
© Estelle Hanania ©
© Mathilde Darel ©
Conceived, choreographed and set design by Gisèle Vienne
With Philip Berlin, Marine Chesnais, Kerstin Daley-Baradel, Sylvain Decloitre, Sophie Demeyer, Vincent Dupuy, Massimo Fusco, Rémi Hollant, Oskar Landström, Théo Livesey, Louise Perming, Katia Petrowick, Jonathan Schatz, Henrietta Wallberg, and Tyra Wigg
Music, Underground Resistance, KTL, Vapour Space, DJ Rolando, Drexciya, The Martian, Choice, Jeff Mills, Peter Rehberg, Manuel Göttsching, Sun Electric and Global Communication
Edits and playlist selection, Peter Rehberg
Sound diffusion supervisor, Stephen O’Malley
Lighting, Patrick Riou
Dramaturgy, Gisèle Vienne, and Dennis Cooper
Produced by DACM / and Compagnie Gisèle Vienne
Coproduced by Maillon – Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne ; Wiener Festwochen ; manège – Scène Nationale – Reims ; Théâtre National de Bretagne (Rennes) ; CDN Orléans/Loiret/Centre ; La Filature, Scène nationale (Mulhouse) ; BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen) ; and Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national
In association with Les Spectacles Vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris // With support from CCN2 – Centre Chorégraphique national de Grenoble and CND Centre national de la danse (Pantin)
First performed on the 8th November 2017 at Maillon – Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne
Crowd, by Gisèle Vienne, a piece for fifteen dancers, muscles its way into a body of work which, over the course of several years, has been dissecting the vast spectrum of our fantasies, emotions, and dark sides, in addition to our inherent need for violence and our sensuality. Flying in the face of the different artistic disciplines, the journey she takes us on renders the onstage experience a cathartic one indeed.
Behind their technical and formal perfection, Gisèle Vienne’s unclassifiable pieces are often perceived as being “unsettling” or “disturbing”. Since Showroomdummies (2001), they been unrelenting in their enquiry into the eternal duality at the core of our humanity – Eros and Thanatos, Apollo and Dionysus – the necessary thirst for violence and sensuality that each of us carries within us, and the place of the erotic and the sacred in our lives. Crowd is a new phase in this single-minded research. Centering on a choreography devised for fifteen performers brought together over the course of a party, this broad reaching polyphony brings to light (of a dark, blinding nature) the various mechanisms underlying such manifestations of collective euphoria, and “the way a specific community handles or otherwise the expression of violence”. After training in music before moving on to the study of puppetry, and feeding off her interest in philosophy and visual arts, Gisèle Vienne brings to the stage a fragmentary universe characterised by the coexistence of several realities. The jerky, halting movements of those that inhabit this universe draw upon urban dance and puppet theatre in equal measure, and Dennis Cooper’s dramaturgy and the DJ set by Peter Rehberg have the combined effect of bringing our perception into disarray. For audience members, this blurring of the frontier between interiority and exteriority is akin to waking up in the midst of a full-on rave. Both resolutely contemporary and archaic in terms of its cathartic dimension, Crowd is the meeting point for a dialogue with our intimate selves.
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For Kerstin
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Running time : 1h30
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