ARCHIVES 2013 / Logobi 05

As opposed to a certain idea of the theatre that would have a director, for the duration of a play, thoroughly exploring a theme, Gintersdorfer/Klassen dare repetition and create a prolix and serial work to give the spectators the time to become familiar with their specific work process and to discover their protagonists. One of them is the dancer and choreographer Franck Edmond Yao alias Gadoukou the Star, who appears in the three plays presented in Avignon.

In Logobi 05, he meets Richard Siegal, the choreographer and contemporary dancer who previously worked in William Forsythe's company. This play is an example of how to proceed from the group and is completely based on improvisation, the interpreters even refraining from repetitions from one night to another. But what is the “logobi”? An Abidjan street dance that, while impressing its spectators, transcribes the truths of daily life into movements. Starting from this cultural and social aesthetic base, a dialogue is created between current Ivorian dance and contemporary Western dance, during which the two acolytes talk, dance and compare their respective experience and humorously explore their differences.

The End of the Western continues this face-to-face in the realm of politics. The five Ivorian protagonists and their two German walk-ons tell the tale of the crisis that shook Ivory Coast two years ago when Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara invented the double democracy by each claiming victory in the presidential election. Portrait of a schizophrenic state, The End of the Western stages bodies that reflect the changing relations of leadership and exhaust themselves in contradictory words and movements.

In this experiment in democracy carried out to the point of the absurd, it is also the egotism of the Western powers that is put on trial. Faced with the Ivory Coast crisis, the “jet set” movement invented the coupé-décalé in the Ivorian diaspora community in Paris: a way of resisting, through parties and glamor, the civil war. Derived from Ivorian slang, “couper” (cut) means to cheat, steal or scam and “décaler” (shift), to flee. The show The Jet Set grasps the codes of this milieu in which spending, luxury and showing off are highly valued, to reach the limits that European self-righteousness sets for itself. In this evening, the subversive game of the jet set blurs the borders between real situations and the extravagance of the roles taken on. MS