FRENETIC BODIES

« Entire afternoons in the concourse of the CENTQUATRE-PARIS… Their number keeps growing, gathering in small groups or working on their routines alone. Each coming with his or her own sound and rhythm: they sweat, they move, they dance for a long, long time. Their breathing is heavy, we hear them counting, discussing, exchanging techniques, showing, watching, practicing over and over. Dancers caught up in the discipline of a performance they all create together, each entering the bubble they construct around themselves, a circle traced out on the ground through the repetition of their movements.  Within this space they find a noisy shelter, a particular resonance in which gestures and music interlace.

I watch them for a long time, sometimes going up for a closer look, to meet them too and to understand their fierce determination. I realize that I seek their dreams, that I seek to pass through the glass walls they build around themselves, like cubes, squares in which they are enclosed and placed on public view. Closely packed together, their bodies sometimes touch, often brush against each other, but they do not seek contact and more often than not remain oblivious to it. 

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In this feverish dedication, I recognize the consuming hunger to devour dance relentlessly. This is a fierce, stubborn dance in which the dancers’ very existence seems to be at stake. And if one watches it for a long time, it is devastating, it becomes disorder, a work of creative rebellion. I know they have dreams, that these dreams fully inhabit them and I too begin to dream. 

A dream of surpassing technique, respect for dogma and the rhythm imposed by this music, always the same at every point of sound, of even surpassing movement, continuous, incessant movement, and reaching dreams by a means other than through spectacle and the performative dimension of so-called urban dance, in order to go further... or rather to get closer to these dancing beings, performers of their dreams. For, when they dance they reveal the fragility and sensitivity within, a well-hidden, moving and confounding interiority, so that, beyond technique and all the hours of training, a pattern emerges from this continuum of frenetic bodies, faces, masks that fall away, solitudes speaking out and promises being sealed. » Radhouane El Meddeb – July 2014