ARCHIVES 2015 / Tombouctou déjà-vu

A community of seven performers puts its unity and its bonds to the test. Trapped within a narration that keeps looping back to the beginning, they topple the balance of every situation, keeping in mind that the central concept of repetition forbids neither movement nor transformation. On the stage, they draw cards: the Oblique Strategies created by musician-producer Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt, which give them rules to follow, to break, to stack one on top of the other. Their accumulation creates the fertile ground on which the group play and stumble, eager to experiment with states, emotions, intentions. Mischievous and sometimes wicked children, romantic characters that fall prey to melancholy...Everything is created in front of us, between extreme precision and fragility, carried by pre-recorded sonic loops which are then reinvented by the dancers. In this invariably circular process begin to appear breaches, like pockets of freedom that each and every one can enter to escape destiny. For through this attempt to break free within repetition itself, what we're talking about here is artistic creation. Much like Timbuktu, a name everyone is familiar with but which is forever fantasised, interpreted, sublimated.

Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh is a choreographer of phenomena, be they social, physiological, psychological, or mechanical: she picks precise facts, observes them, understands them, then transforms them into choreographic and plastic material. After the creation of her company Sui generis in 1997, she first started looking into emotions. She spent two months with neurologist Antonio Damasio in Iowa City to work on Texture/Composite (1999). She then read Jean Oury on schizophrenia, which inspired the play Sagen (2001). This was followed by a more minimalist cycle, based on the themes of repetition, time, and memory, a product of research, work, and life experiences: Croisées (Crossroads, 2004), White light (2005), and Ici/Per.For (2006). The masculine/feminine dichotomy, as well as a more formal research on the relationships between bodies, music, and voice, have been the central axes of her work since 2007 (Ad Astra, Eaux-fortes, -insight-).Since 2012, she has been the director of the Phare, Centre chorégraphique national du Havre Haute-Normandie, and her interest for science has progressively joined her research on fiction and narration to give her plays an additional dramatic dimension.