Merce Cunningham Alessandro Sciarroni

Winterbranch / TURNING_motion sickness version Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon

Archive 2019
Dance
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
decemberdec 18 – 21

© Winterbranch © Jaime Roque De La Cruz ©

© Winterbranch © Jaime Roque De La Cruz ©

© "TURNING_motion sickness version"© Michel Cavalca ©

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Winterbranch :
Choreography, Merce Cunningham
Music, La Monte Young, 2 Sounds
Lighting, Beverly Emmons, based on the original lighting design by Robert Rauschenberg
Decors and costumes, Robert Rauschenberg
Restaged by Jennifer Goggans, and Cherryl Therrien
With three male dancers and three female dancers from Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon
First performed on the 21st March 1964 at Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford)
Original production by Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Winterbranch (1964) © Merce Cunningham Trust. All rights reserved.
TURNING_motion sickness version :
Choreography, Alessandro Sciarroni
Music, Yes Sœur ! (Alexandre Bouvier and Grégoire Simon)
With dancers from Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon
Lighting, Sébastien Lefèvre
Costumes, Ettore Lombardi
First performed on the 14th September 2016 at Opéra national de Lyon, as part of the Biennale de la Danse
Produced by Opéra national de Lyon
In association with Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS ; Théâtre de la Ville-Paris ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from Fondation d’entreprise Hermès as part of its New Settings programme
In partnership with France Inter and ARTE

Winterbranch, which entered into the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon’s repertory in 2016, reveals a darker side to the work of Merce Cunningham. Amidst a dissonant ambience, bodies fall and get back up again, in a constant struggle with gravity. In resonance with this downwards pull towards the ground, the choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni has devised a vertiginous, haunting form of gyration for his dancers.

For this programme, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon focuses on the idea of dance as an instrument for understanding the body via its elementary operations: lunges, tumbles, gravity, repetition, and the relationship between verticality and horizontality. Merce Cunningham and the Italian choreographer have, a priori, little in common, except, that is, their shared belief in envisaging the human body as an infinite source of potential, and which functions at the heart of a vast system of signs. In Winterbranch, Cunningham seeks to find a form or framework for the act of falling and getting back up again, the abscissa and the ordinate of movement. Rauschenberg’s light-dark stage design and the shards of sound in La Monte Young’s minimalist composition, entitled 2 sounds, imbibe the work with a sombre tonality. As in Folk(s), which pushed folklore dance to implosion point, Alessandro Sciarroni investigates repetition as a form of limit. Stemming from the “turning” project, TURNING_motion sickness version, created for the dancers at the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, seeks to come closer to perpetual movement – to the extent of dizziness. At the crossroads between the whirling dervishes and classical ballet, this intriguing piece subjects the performers to a test of mastery and endurance, indistinguishable from a form of release and consenting to the incontrollable
––––––
Running time : 1h10 including interval

See also

CENTQUATRE-PARIS
novembernov 5 – 8
Maison de la musique de Nanterre – Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national
novembernov 9
Théâtre Louis Aragon, Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art et création – danse – Tremblay-en-France
novembernov 30

Alessandro Sciarroni
U. (un canto)

Performance
Buy tickets

A year after the premier of IRIS at the Butte-aux-Cailles swimming pool, commissioned by the Festival d'Automne, in which he explored the Italian polyphonic repertoire, Alessandro Sciarroni brings us U. (un canto). This music-based performance piece evokes the profoundly mysterious relationship between human beings and nature.

In the same place

CENTQUATRE-PARIS
octoberoct 5 - november – nov 5

LIMINAL, Forensic Oceanography, Border Forensics
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Featuring different works by the LIMINAL, Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics collectives, the multimedia installation From Sea to Sky approaches intersectional immobility and frontier-based violence at sea. The objective is to highlight the way in which the Mediterranean maritime space has been transformed into a militarized border zone.
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
octoberoct 5 – 10

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Zifzafa, is an arabic word to describe a wind that shakes and rattles all in its path. Here, it becomes the title of a performance of artist and researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan, that enmeshes sonic composition, video game engines and spoken word, to immerse us in the heart of a movement to resist green colonialism in the occupied Syrian Golan heights. 
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
novembernov 5 – 8
Maison de la musique de Nanterre – Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national
novembernov 9
Théâtre Louis Aragon, Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art et création – danse – Tremblay-en-France
novembernov 30

Alessandro Sciarroni
U. (un canto)

Performance
Buy tickets

A year after the premier of IRIS at the Butte-aux-Cailles swimming pool, commissioned by the Festival d'Automne, in which he explored the Italian polyphonic repertoire, Alessandro Sciarroni brings us U. (un canto). This music-based performance piece evokes the profoundly mysterious relationship between human beings and nature.
CENTQUATRE-PARIS
decemberdec 4 – 8

Lina Majdalanie, Rabih Mroué
Quatre murs et un toit

Theatre Portrait
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In 1947, the trial of German playwright Bertolt Brecht took place in the United States in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), responsible for combating communist activism. It was here that Brecht wrote a declaration which he was forbidden to read out. The minutes of the trial, as well as this declaration, constitute one of the axes of this exuberant show.