-Light Bird - Dancers and red crowned cranes
CREATION 2015 - Chorégraphie de Luc Petton & Marilén Iglesias-Breuker
Statement of intent
From the beginning, the question we asked ourselves as choreographer, has been the one about the sharing with the other, an « other » of a different kind of species. Which possibility of communication with it ? What space can we create so the relation can exist, without giving it all the place ? Like the philosopher Vinciane Despret says : « with the animals, we welcome with the body ». Who better than the dancer then can be this relation vector ?
The choreography sets down intervals to create the welcome : the birds welcoming the dancer and the dancer welcoming the birds. In rehearsal the cranes are curious like children, they are coming to search, examine, listen, and, thanks to their size, they take a royal place on the stage. The dancer pays great attention and answers in a precise and random way at once. The stage becomes a place of coexistence,where the five interpreters from different generations, from 19 to 58 years, from different cultures and training, progress and adopte each other in respect, as well as they adopt the cranes. Sharing the stage with the cranes makes us enter in another temporality, like in a suspended time, sort of truth from the daily reality.
The crane is a paradoxal animal, we feel her prehistory and her metaphysics coexisting in a stunning way. Despite the impregnation, it stays potentially dangerous. One do not catch a crane's eye without something resonating, something matter of an immemorial feeling.
Dancing with birds involved a predisposition to unpredictable. Interpreters, dancers and musician have developped an aptitude for the unpredictable still being vigilant to the show's thread. The composition is both structured and half-opened. It finds its outcome on stage with a part of in vivo creation. The Patrick Bouchain set design shows this characteristic. The ground, formed by skins, becomes a live biotope subject to creasing, movements and breathing. Nothing stays rigid or unequivocal.
Likewise, Philippe Berthomé lights created a dynamic space which punctuates the action. The red crowned cranes are more perceptiv to music than other species, with a very fine listening, sensible to subtle variations, characteristic integrated by Xavier Rosselle in the composition and reproduced live on stage. The musician, the breath, becomes partner in the game as well as the dancers with the cranes.
The red crowned cranes, despite their immortality symbolic, stays paradoxically a threatened species due to the destruction of their natural biotope. The reproduction rate in a natural environment being particularly low, some zoos participate to the conservation of the species by hatching eggs under veterinary control. The Parc de la Tête d'Or allowed to engage the hatching and socialization hatching, pursued at the Parc zoologique d'Amiens Métropole, which welcomed the six birds participating to the creation. The descendant are part of a species conservation program by reintroduction and repopulation in natural environment. Preserving our natural spaces is although preserving our cultural spaces, our imaginary territories.
If the natural environment impoverishes itself, our cultural world impoverishes as well. Could we speak of a soul ecology ?
Luc Petton
