Gisèle Vienne

Crowd

Archive 2021
Dance
MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis
decemberdec 15 – 18

© © Estelle Hanania ©

© © Estelle Hanania ©

© © Mathilde Darel ©

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Concept, choreography and scenography, Gisèle Vienne
Assisted by Anja Röttgerkamp and Nuria Guiu Sagarra
With Philip Berlin, Marine Chesnais, Sylvain Decloitre, Sophie Demeyer, Vincent Dupuy, Massimo Fusco, Rehin Hollant, Oskar Landström, Theo Livesey, Louise Perming, Katia Petrowick, Jonathan Schatz, Henrietta Wallberg and Tyra Wigg (alternately with Lucas Bassereau, Nuria Guiu Sagarra, Georges Labbat and Linn Ragnarsson)
Lighting, Patrick Riou
Dramaturgy, Gisèle Vienne, and Dennis Cooper
Music, Underground Resistance, KTL, Vapour Space, DJ Rolando, Drexciya, The Martian, Choice, Jeff Mills, Peter Rehberg, Manuel Göttsching, Sun Electric, and Global Communication
Editing and music selection, Peter Rehberg
Sound diffusion design, Stephen O’Malley
Costumes, Gisèle Vienne in collaboration with Camille Queval and the performers
In association with MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, le CND Centre national de la danse and Festival d’Automne à Paris. 
A production by DACM
A coproduction by Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national ; Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg – Scène européenne ; Wiener Festwochen ; manège – Scène Nationale – Reims ; Théâtre national de Bretagne – Centre européen de production théâtrale et chorégraphique (Rennes) ; Centre dramatique national Orléans Centre-Val de Loire ; La Filature, Scène nationale (Mulhouse) ; BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen)
In association with MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bobigny) ; CND Centre national de la danse (Pantin) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from CCN2 – Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble, and CND Centre national de la danse (Pantin)
With thanks to Louise Bentkowski, Dominique Brun, Patric Chiha, Zac Farley, Uta Gebert, Margret Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Isabelle Piechaczyk, Arco Renz, Jean-Paul Vienne, and Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak
With support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
Partnership with France Culture

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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