MONDAY JULY 31 AND TUESDAY AUGUST 1, 2023
TENTATIVES D’APPROCHES D’UN POINT DE SUSPENSION
A WRITING LABORATORY
Because I had just reached the age when we can, in all seriousness and regardless of the course of events, anticipate the broad outlines of our lives to come and speak of our future days with that air of the past, I set about drawing up a program. This age was not an objective threshold, nor a temporal reality: this age was the awareness of something. However many days remained, and even according to the most audacious prognosis, it would be too few.
My program was to defuse time. Of course, this in itself was impossible. But there were methods of approach. It would be simple and definitive. A single sentence would suffice to say it: "Tentatives d'approches d'un point de suspension." Something like a desire for a work, then, with its motifs (chairs, stairs, floors...), its variations and its forces (gravity, balance, inertia...). With this perseverance to approach the present, which always eludes us. And the conviction that a work takes on its full consistency over time. It's a process, shared over the long term by a committed team.
APPROACH 17. ESCALIER / YOANN / OPENING
Approach 17 is a dance composed to Philip Glass's Opening. This dance is a simplification of any existential trajectory - alternating falls and suspensions - along a staircase that leads nowhere. It thwarts temporal chronology by declining the motif of reversibility. On an invisible score, the character tricks the void, playing with the laws of gravity and weightlessness to achieve a state of freedom between balance and imbalance.
It's a visual poem that reinvents a vertiginous, sensitive march towards the point of suspension, the instant of the absolute present, when the flight of a body reaches its apogee and the fall has not yet begun.
NUMBER...
Is this very specific format, thought to have fallen into disuse, claimed by a so-called "traditional" circus and abandoned by a so-called "new" circus, an anachronism? I've chosen to reinvest in this form, whose singular economy presents a number of specific features.
The act is the short form par excellence. We've often heard of a duration of around 8 minutes, but that doesn't mean anything. The number is a condensed form. It's the maximum reduction of a form that reaches its greatest intensity. In the kitchen, the principle of decoction could be likened to it.
At the end of this process of wear-and-tear simplification by extraction, there's a dream of the absolute: an act must stand on its own. Without the cultural scaffolding, in any context. An act must be able to last. Despite the life that passes over bodies, and the old age that inevitably comes, the act will exist for a lifetime.
A successful act must be able to play everywhere, all the time.And yet, despite this infinite demand, an act will never claim to Meaning, with that capital "S". It doesn't have that arrogance. Because no number is sovereign, not even number 1. No number will ever forget the multiplicity of wholes. He says nothing but what he says, without denying the other numbers that come before and after him. It has this humility. The meaning is in him alone, and it is through this, and this alone, that he reaches the universal.
Performers : Yoann Bourgeois / Marie Bourgeois
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