La grâce du tombeur
Creators: Antoine Pickels, Thierry Smits, Drem Bruinsma, Steven Brown, Paul Zahl, Nikolas Klau, Marco Forcella, Isabelle Van Petteghem, Damien De Lepeleire
From the outset, we distance ourselves from the resolutely elegant and often mawkish aesthetic tendencies of certain forms of dance, which approach the various themes in such a way as to respect criteria of harmony. Like any other artistic expression, dance can offer itself the privilege of showing disarray, terror and violence without pretense, and this is the path the piece takes us down. The dramaturgy of this solo, performed in a 4 x 4 metre sandbox, is based on the myth of Icarus and structured in three parts: the labyrinth, the flight and the fall. It's a laborious search for freedom hampered by the sandy floor, whose instability forces the dancer to re-establish a balance that slips away again and again. Visually, this exploration produces a succession of jumps and falls set to music with an intense, sustained rhythm; it continues with arm movements and a constantly compromised quest for aplomb against a background of brass instruments, and finally ends with a hallucinatory, frenzied spinning that the dancer accomplishes by projecting sand around himself. The ultimate impression is one of dizzying, swirling, endless turmoil.