Elle(s)

multimedia dance performance
Concept, choreography and dance - Fabienne Berger; Original music - Christian Garcia (Velma); Video - Bastien Genoux, Bruno Deville; Lighting - Dominique Dardant, Guillaume Rossier; Lighting technician - Eloi Gianini; Stage design - Carola Burgi; Costumes - Claude Rueger; Make-up - Nathalie Monod; Assistant and sound technician - Floriane Piguet; Video technician - Yvan von Arx; Outside eye - Dominique Bourquin

A performance proved to be convincing both in choreographic language and by its complex and surprising video set-up. The piece offers answers to Berher's original inquiry into how one body can create the illusion of several others through movement and images.

Concentrated body language, movements sometimes barely suggested, welcome changes of pace, and breadth of gesture are all part of this dancer's impressive mastery of her language. Fabienne Berger's vocabulary also draws in a large part on her facial expressiveness, with the result that she absorbs the images (the fruit of long and patient research) and invests them, just as she inhabits the various costumes which she slips into and out of throughout the piece. And what stands out is the miracle of choreography. Just as in her previous creation, "Lien" one ends up with the impression of having seen something other than a real body dancing, of having been elsewhere and seen something more. This parallel experience is not an illusion sustained by clever trickery with images, but comes in fact from the tremor of life which Fabienne Berger breathes into them. Between movement and image stretches a field of inquiry, from which each person can draw whatever touches them: otherness, difference, birth, death loneliness, and so forth.

Berger chose the solo form to explore other realities than her ownq and as well to increase her freedom and to invent a ‘dance’, without having theworry of passing it on. This choice is a natural continuance of her three last works – how to make one in the plural with avril en mai, then exploring the contradiction between singular and plural with Lien and this searching for the plural dimension in the singular, and questioning one's relationship with the other, on a worldwide scale. On stage she presents a woman crisscrossed by the world, so that other people's bodies fuse into hers. What results is a ‘cubist’ dance in which postures, movements and attitudes blend into a carrousel of intimate and vast spaces. It is a work about empathy, about reproducing the other in oneself. Here, the stage is conceived as a pictorial and cinematographic energy field in which the body goes through things and vice versa.Playing the part of a woman who gathers fragments of other people's experiences she delves into empathy, in particular her capacity to feel another reality than her own. She is interested in exploring the space that exists within people which cuts them off from their private universe.

In seeking to absorb these ‘others’, she confronte wholeness and fragmentation. How does one make mosaic of images with the body, without breaking up inside? How can one distinguish when the body is bearing the presence of the other, and when it is not? The identities portrayed on stage are fragmented, floating and vague. One can read into it a reflection of crumbling humanity, serious but sublimated. Berher’s prime concern is identity, as a moving value, not as a source of alienation.

She assembles fragments of other lives, and makes her body like a house. She searched out these ‘others’, by digging into the catalogue of images that are accessible to everyone, such as press or magazine photographs, memories of the cinema or other media stored in a more or less distant consciousness… The press photos which she has been collecting for years and which she uses for her montages serve as her starting material. She absorbs today's visual environment and blend it with older elements using as her source of inspiration a mixture of universal images ranging from Picasso to modern advertising, from a David Lynch film to a documentary. Hence, a visual montage is created from her body which becomes movement.

Мore information for Fabienne Berger Company
Fabienne Berger is a French-speaking Swiss choreographer and dancer who, in the course of her creations, invented an unclassifiable style of dance. Mixing bodies in play and human meditation, her shows, which have received several honours, present an aesthetic influenced by the visual arts and incorporate original music and video. Already acclaimed in Europe, the Middle East, the USA and Russia, as well as in Switzerland under the name Compagnie Fabienne Berger, she has co-produced over twenty different shows with Swiss and International Theatres. Going beyond duality and handling difference are the hallmarks of Fabienne Berger's work. In her choice of subject matter, of dancers, in her approach to creation and movement, and in the conception of the show, she explores the complex and paradoxical rapport between writing and improvisation, between what is fixed and what is flexible. Her language, which is unclassifiable and immediately distinguishable from others, is in a constant state of obstinate renewal to create a dance which she calls ‘work in progress’. Her body language seeks to catch and then re-draw the ordinary and extraordinary acts of private life, bound into a human frieze. Her points of departure are ways of holding oneself, of moving, of losing one's balance, of falling, of catching oneself, of hesitating, resisting, charging, reacting, acting or seizing. It is an independent choreographic quest, in close relation with the music which ties her to a composer in each creation.

More information: http://www.fabienneberger.ch/accueil_angl.htm

A production of Fondation Cie Fabienne Berger, Xavier Munger (Switzerland)
With the support of Arts Council of Switzerland Pro Helvetia.

March 19 (Wednesday), 8.00 p.m.
Red hall
Duration: 60 min.
Tickets: 9/6 BGN

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