ARCHIVES 2017 / It’s a legend

Like a fairy tale, It's a legend gives younger audiences the opportunity to explore the art of movement in six chapters. From academic classicism at the court of Louis XIV to theatricality in the work of Pina Bausch, Raphaël Cottin's show is a visual book from which emerge some of the greatest choreographic revolutions that transformed the relationship to the stage of artists, but also of audiences. Evoking Isadora Duncan's free dance, Rudolf Laban's pedagogy and analysis of movement, or the abstraction of movement in Alwin Nikolais's work, It's a legend is a modern series in which portraits and practices endlessly echo and contradict each other. Onstage, dance is thought, told, and shown, unless it is doing the telling and showing, jumping from one end of the history of choreography to the other. The desire of this young choreographer, who for the first time will not be dancing in one of his shows, is not only to share the great changes in the history of choreography, but above all to awaken a veritable “thirst for dance.” Alternating poetic and unusual images, It's a legend assures with serious levity that the poetry of movement and the autonomy of the body are linked to those of the mind...

Raphaël Cottin
After graduating from the Conservatoire national supérieur de danse in Paris, Raphaël Cottin danced for Stéphanie Aubin, Christine Gérard, Odile Duboc, and Daniel Dobbels. In 2008, he joined the company directed by Thomas Lebrun—who became director of the Centre choréographique national in Tours in 2012—with whom he danced in France and abroad. A certified trainer, he teaches Wilfride Piollet's technique, Flexible Barres, which focuses on training and on the autonomy of the dancer's work. With his company La Poétique des Signes, he created seven shows as a choreographer between 2008 and 2015, including Les 7 premiers jours (The first 7 days), a quartet for which he worked with dancer Lola Keraly, flutist Cédric Jullion, and actress Sophie Lenoir, or Buffet à vif, co-written with Pierre Meunier and Marguerite Bordat for the Sujets à Vif of the Festival d'Avignon in 2014. The recording of movement using Labanotation is at the heart of his practice and inspired his new show for younger audiences, It's a legend. In 2018, he will be joined onstage by ballet dancer Jean Guizerix for his newest creation, Parallèles.