Vivaldis
2019
This is a dance film set in nature - a film about nature that never stops dancing.
In a splendid mountain landscape at the beginning of summer, in Savoy, brightly-colored characters move about. They seem to form a people with unknown customs. They sport beards, crests and various headdresses, reflecting their different personalities.
In their knitted costumes, decorated with multicolored geometric shapes, they trace soft, precise lines, echoing the rocky crests, the shape of a lake or the curve of a valley - echoing the perfection of nature, never twice identical. This perfection allows us to rethink, with greater freedom, the notion of symmetry in dance.
Likewise, Vivaldi's accompanying music offers infinite variations on the same theme, powerful yet delicate, symmetrical yet never twice the same. [ Mandolin Concerto In C Major, RV 425: III. Allegro ; Cantate "Cessate, Omai Cessate", Rv 684: Ah Ch'infelice Sempre ; Sonata a quatro "Al Santo Sepolcro", RV 130: Largo molto ; Concerto Ripieno In C Major, Rv 114: III. Ciac- cona].
The dances in this film - quintets, sextets, quartets, duets - were initially one of the pieces in Nouvelles Pièces Courtes, a series of short forms premiered in spring 2017 at La Coursive theater in La Rochelle and touring France and abroad ever since. The desire came to engrave these Vivaldis a few springs later, in a natural environment that could also be viewed as a body, moving in the camera games and as moving as the dancing bodies: as if the same emotion could pass from bodies to places and from places to bodies, in a fluidity where we are aware that nothing ever reproduces itself twice, neither in performance nor in nature. The aim is to grasp what can be grasped, to catch the ephemeral.