"Celebrating Dance" at the 22nd Val-de-Marne Biennale

the national choreographic development centre continues its momentum

Appointed on January 1, 2021 to the management of the Briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne located in Vitry-sur-Seine, Sandra Neuveut signed the program for her first participation in the biennial.

"The 22nd Val-de-Marne Dance Biennale resolutely cultivates the many nuances of dance. Irradiated by the artistic vitality of the Suds, it invites us to discover a great diversity of works gathered in three components, porous and interwoven: celebration, transmission and imagination, underlines Sandra Neuveut.

Dominique Bagouet, Anne Nguyen, Brigitte Seth, Roser Montllo Guberna, Nadia Beugre, Maud Le Pladec, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Silvia Gribaudi, Tereza Ondrova, Tania Carvalho, Aina Alegre, Yasmine Hugonnet, Volmir Cordeiro...

Celebrating dance is the aim of this Edition, with highlights of choreographic heritage such as Dance by Lucinda Childs or Necesito by Dominique Bagouetby talented young artists. A joyful celebration that can be found at the heart of the Afro dances choreographed by Anne Nguyen or in the trio leaping from Brigitte Seth and Roser Montllo Guberna. Transmitting gestures and questioning legacies is the driving force behind many of the shows taking place in this biennial. Nadia Beugre which embody a female body in resistance, of Maud Le Pladec which brings together two portraits of dancers or of the collective Naif Production that vibrates generations of amateurs around the figure of the door. Marco da Silva Ferreiracombines the energy of urban and traditional dances, while the Portuguese duo Jonas and Lander invents a crazy fado. Finally, imagining choreographic utopias is the horizon of spirited choreographers: Silvia Gribaudi and Tereza Ondrova invite us to become insects while Tania Carvalho displays its whimsical ballet. Si Aina Alegre brings together a musical and dancing community for a celebration of air and breath, Yasmine Hugonnet and her ventriloquist dancers make new voices heard, when Volmir Cordeiro and his procession of clowns have a creaking humor imagine other possible worlds.

It was with great pleasure that I discovered this territory of the Val-de-Marne and the beautiful energies that animate it to design this 22nd biennial. The entire brickyard team and partners are waiting to share the momentum!"

Sandra Neuveut, director of the CDCN brickyard in Val-de-Marne and programmer of the biennial

Focus on 5 shows accompanied by the DRAC

"THIS IS NOT "An act of love & resistance", Aina Alegre

creation 2022

"THIS IS NOT "an act of love & resistance" is a drift around air. Air as subject and matter. Air as an element of interdependence and interpenetration of bodies. I gather around this project 11 performers (6 dancers and 5 musicians). Together, we are going to dig a physical and sonic matter in order to give a consciousness and a consistency to the air, an invisible element, indispensable to life, which connects us. By approaching the body as a channel of air, breath, movements and words in connection with rhythm, voice and music, a collective "physicality" will be born. Together, we will cross the notions of repetition, variation, resonance, vibration and polyrhythmia"explains Aina Alegre, dancer, performer and choreographer, who since January 2023 has taken over the direction of the Centre Chorégraphique de Grenoble, in tandem with the performer, Yannick Hugron.

Aina Alegre, This is not © PhileDeprez

Since January 2023, Aina Alegre has taken over the direction of the Centre Chorégraphique de Grenoble, in tandem with the performer, Yannick Hugron. Dancer, performer and choreographer, she is interested in choreographic creation as a field to "reimagine" the body. She explores different cultures and body practices, understood as social, historical and anthropological representations. Fiction as a genre and cultural practice also feeds his work. She thinks about the body in fictional environments and works around notions such as hybridization, plasticity of movement, the state of presence and the experience of time in order to generate corpus of images, ideas, concepts.

Its structure of production, Studio Fictive has received support from DRAC Île-de-France under a 2022/2024 agreement.

ABRI / Volmir Cordeiro / Donna Volcan Company

creation 2023

With the program of "choosing a place, making a face of it, welcoming forms of life and thoughts, "gardening possibilities up to the end by ensauvager" Volmir Cordeiro leads us in his dance.

Volmir Cordeiro first studied theatre and then worked with Brazilian choreographers Alejandro Ahmed, Cristina Moura and Lia Rodrigues. He joined "Essais" in 2011 at the CNDC in Angers.

Volmir Cordeiro, Abri © Fernanda Tafner

As a choreographer, he created an undergraduate work cycle composed of three solos: Sky (2012, created at CNDC Angers), Inês (2014, premiered at the Actoral Festival) and Street (2015, created at the Louvre Museum). He teaches regularly in choreographic training schools such as the Master’s Degree (ICI-CCN Montpellier) and at the Camping festival, at the CND, in Pantin. He is the author of "Ex-Corpo" book dedicated to the figures of marginality in contemporary dance and the notion of artist-researcher. In 2022 with Erosion, created for the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine, Volmir Cordeiro will revisit the Swedish Ballets, a special Dadaist troupe installed at the Théâtre de Champs-Elysées between 1920 and 1925. His company Donna Volcan thinks of volcanic as the foundation of creation: earth, fire, air and vital impulse.

Between 2021 and 2023, he was an artist associated with the CDCN brickyard in Val-de-Marne and Points communs, Nouvelle scène nationale in Cergy-Pontoise and Val d'Oise. Volmir Cordeiro was awarded the 2021 Prix Nouveau Talent - Chorégraphie by SACD. Donna Volcan Co is supported received the assistance of the DRAC Ile-de-France

Material(s) First(s) Ballet for six Afro dancers Compagnie par Terre/ Anne Nguyen

creation 2023

Afro dance, a dance in full effervescence coming from the African continent, makes vibrate the youth of the whole world. Sensual, frenetic, rooted in both traditional and urban multicultural roots, it brings us back to the primordial language of the body. Starting material(s) is an initiatory journey into the universe of African urban music.

Anne Nguyen, Raw Materials © Patrick_Berger

From helpless rage to prayers for ancestors, from the reconstruction of scorned identities to the visceral necessity of dancing in order not to submit, six bodies with converging paths and problems come together to exorcise their demons. Dancers' movements explicitly refer to colonization, slavery, mechanisms of cultural and mental domination, military violence and looting of resources. By the simplicity of dance, by the presence of bodies and by the symbols of gestures, the choreography brings us questioned the balance of power on which the relations between Africa and the West are based.

The titles of Anne Nguyen’s shows evoke her multiple influences: mathematics and martial arts but also utopias and myths. It is first by writing that she expresses her will to free the mind through the body.

The Company by Earth receives multi-year support from DRAC Ile-de-France

SALTI/ Roser Montllo Guberna and Brigitte Seth, Cie Always after midnight

Salti © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

SALTI is an all-public show created from the tarentelle, the popular dance of southern Italy. The tarentelle is a healing dance. Indeed, it does care for people called "tarantolata", or "tarantata", that is to say, bitten and infected by the venom of the "taranta", poisonous insect. If music and dance are indeed what is prescribed to the patient to deliver him from fevers and all the evils, these remedies also prove contagious. But it is a joyful, festive contagion. Today, only a few villages in southern Italy have preserved this age-old ceremonial. But, the music and dances of the tarantella persist, because they always have the power to exert emotional changes, to allow to reach other levels of consciousness, to purge bodies and spirits.

The narrative that supports the dramatic thread of history, punctuating the trance, offers breaths, pauses and twists. Words and music of words, breathing, trembling, vibrations, are like so many visual and sound perceptions that make up the language of SALTI. The manifestations of the body are always related to thought; text, dance and music are inseparable.

The Company Always after midnight is covered by the DRAC Île-de-France

IN A CORNER THE SKY SURRENDERS – UNPLUGGING ARCHIVAL JOURNEYS … # 1 (FOR NADIA)... Robyn Orlin

resumption

"Looking back... the Lower East Side, Manhattan...1994...

Robyn-Orlin Montpellier Danse 2022 © Francois-Kohl

"In New York to work, I am struck by the survival instinct of the homeless. The streets of the Lower East Side are a place of cardboard box trafficking, especially those that are large enough to form makeshift shelters, and whose possession is sometimes the subject of violent fights. Since I couldn’t find a place to work, I also used large cardboard boxes... that’s how I created my solo, in a corner…, which I then played in New York, Chicago, South Africa and Australia..."

Born 1955 in Johannesburg, Robyn Orlin is a dancer, choreographer and founder of the City Theatre & Dance Group (1988). In 1981, during a solo performance at the Breytenbach Theatre in Pretoria, Adrienne C.Sichel described her as "a very angry young dancer". Nicknamed in South Africa "permanent irritation", she reveals, through her work, the difficult and complex reality of her country. She integrates various artistic expressions (text, video, visual arts...), to explore a certain theatricality that is reflected in her choreographic vocabulary.

This show received support for the DRAC Île-de-France project

See also

C A R C A S S / Marco da Silva Ferreira Pensamento Avulso

creation 2022

Marco Da Silva Ferreira CARCASS0 © Josee Caldeira

In C A R C A S S, Marco da Silva Ferreira uses dance as a research tool on community, the construction of collective identity, memory and cultural crystallization. The choreography, initially based on a game of legs jumps, engine and accelerator, gradually draws a vibrant, rebellious and carnival body. A cast of 10 performers forms a collective that seeks its identity in a physical and intuitive flow. They start with a game of legs (footwork) that is familiar to them, coming from clubbing, battles, cyphers, to approach standardized and immutable folk dances related to their memory/legacy. Co-production and co-production of bricks & mortar Maison des Arts de Créteil

The skin of space Yasmine Hugonnet

creation 2022

Les Porte Voix © Anne-Laure Lechat

What is this invisible body that touches us all? That vibrates between our skins? Who is the support of our fictions and our imaginaries? The Skin of Space is a solo that is born from the desire to make the audience feel, see and hear the motor thoughts that animate the creative work. The Skin of Space sets up concepts of bodily presences. Or begins and ends the form in dance? What is a body locates? How to materialize gravity? Proprioception? What information is exchanged between a body and a public? In 2020, Yasmine Hugonnet is the winner of the Label + romand with her project Les Porte-Voix. In November 2021, she creates the solo La peau de l'Espace. Co-production of brickyard & Val-de-Marne Museum of Contemporary Art with the Swiss Cultural Centre. On Tour

VERSA-VICE / Tania Carvalho

creation 2023

© Drawing Tânia Carvalho

The Portuguese dancer and choreographer, Tania Carvalho, invites to a frantic dance that simultaneously summons cinema, painting, mime or theatre. For Tania Carvalho, life is dance. Dancers unfold like chimeric and vampire presences that attack the stage, strike the ground and fill the space with their disturbing strangeness. Co-production and co-direction: brickyard &
the Jacques Carat Theatre in Cachan

Discover all the programming of the 22nd Biennial