2024 is a year of many changes for Montpellier Danse, a dance festival initiated by Dominique Bagouet in 1981 in the wake of the Nouvelle danse current. This 44th edition was the last directed by Jean-Paul Montanari, after over four decades at the head of the event. Christian Rizzo will also bid farewell to the National Choreographic Center (CCN) of Montpellier/Occitanie, which developed in close collaboration with the festival. The two institutions will merge into a brand new structure as of next year, announced Montpellier mayor Mickaël Delafosse. With this turning point marked by two departures and a whole future ahead, this year’s two-week programme gathered a wide range of artists from all over Europe and beyond. After Wayne McGregor, Robyn Orlin and Mette Ingvartsen, here are some thoughts on a sample of works I attended in the second half of the event.
review, article
Montpellier Danse 2024
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15 min
Mille et une nuits
Sorour Darabi
In the dim-lit space of Studio Bagouet, Mille et une nuits (One Thousand and One Nights) brings out a troubling chaotic ritual. Performer and choreographer Sorour Darabi takes on the mythical collection of middle-eastern stories to turn it into a queer mystical opera. As the audience sits all around a wet stage marked out with white tape, all one can see are the ropes hanging from above and chains holding roughly sculptured ice blocks. Darabi is standing to one side in the spotlight, wearing bottomless thick pants, body undulating and arms waving in an enveloping, mesmerising way. As they walk towards the stage, another bright light cuts out their figure with rays of shadows. The aesthetic effect is at first striking, but soon melts away. When three other performers enter and all take turns at singing siren calls, their convulsing and crawling bodies seem to progress as slowly as the water puddling below the ice. The atmosphere, reminiscent of an endless rite of passage, also summons aphrodisiac fantasies of the Orient. In a slow-motion erotic scene, two performers passionately embrace, intertwining their legs and arms as a flutist and harpist play sweet and enchanting melodies. But despite glimpses of visual mastery, this two-hour ritual feels abstruse. The performance meanders through dreamlike glaring and opaque lights, but the piece itself remains deeply shrouded in mystery.
takemehome
Dimitri Chamblas
At night in the open air Théâtre de l’Agora, French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas and visual artist Kim Gordon play wild card with takemehome. But freestyle is merely a ploy in this rock’n’roll experimental piece. What happens onstage looks like an organised chaos: a bean-shaped zeppelin hanging with cables and lit from the inside turning purple, white, blue and red; random people lying down here and there, as if sleeping, walking a few steps alongside the performers only to get back to their seat in the audience; dancers individually rushing, pausing, fighting or contorting their double-jointed bodies; plugging electric guitars into amplifiers and playing a chord as far as it will go, with a challenging stare at the audience.
Moving bodies continually disperse onstage and off, and yet one can sense a subtle connection between them. Marion Barbeau, former Paris Opera Ballet dancer, dives into a completely different physicality, exploring dislocated movements with her elbows, shoulders and knees with great fluidity and flexibility. Years of ballet training blend smartly with popping, breakdance and gaga styles in her gestures – so too for Eva Galmel, also intensively trained in ballet. Moving all together as a group, the bodies transcend multiple checks and balances. At root, their talent offsets the work’s loose dramatic structure, so although the piece feels a bit ungrounded, the performers certainly own the stage.
Discofoot
Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley – CCN-Ballet de Lorraine
Ballet technique does not only merge with various dance genres, it can also cross with sports. Half way through the Euros and a few weeks before the Paris Olympics, the dancers of CCN-Ballet de Lorraine turn Montpellier’s Place de la Comédie into a football field, grooving to a disco playlist. In Discofoot, choreographers Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley split the company into two teams going head-to-head in a match where the one rule is to not run. Leaving their tutus and pointe shoes in the locker room, the dancer-players show off their shiny pink and blue sports tops and gold shorts. On the artificial turf where Swan Lake meets Funkytown, they shoot the mirrorball with développés, fouettés and grands jetés, but also voguing, jazz, aerobics and bopping. Under the watchful eye of a three-person jury, both teams play the game with flying colours, including slow-motion fights, kicky drama and swaggering penalty shoot-outs. The concept is no novelty: in 1913 the Ballets Russes’ had already set a tennis match to the music of Debussy in Jeux. Here the goal is not to score, but to showcase dance as a source of great creativity, bringing together spectator-supporters in a cheerful atmosphere. Proving that dance is still in the running for fun, the piece may rightfully be called fair play.
Le monde en transe (trilogy)
Taoufiq Izzediou
While Covid 19 lockdown deeply affected human relationships, many performing artists drew inspiration from the experience of isolation to reflect on their own creative process. For Moroccan choreographer Taoufiq Izzediou, it signalled the start of a trilogy on trance. Each part, about one hour long, explores the position of between one’s inner self and greater spiritual powers. First comes HMADCHA, named after a Sufi brotherhood known for a deep interest in breath, dance and percussion. On a white stage carpet, dancer Hassan Oumzili ripples his bare torso and shoulders, as if materialising the echoing sound of waves. Standing in an orange light, he starts jumping energetically back and forth and side to side, forming geometrical patterns. Seven men come in one by one and cross paths over rectangles of light reminiscent of piano keys. They progressively step up the pace with convoluting moves, martial stomping or free spinning, shaking and bouncing. Set to an electro ostinato, the repetitive choreography narrowly avoids redundancy as it gradually heads toward a connection to the beyond. As if invoking a transcendental force, the performers turn towards a bright light pulsing on a stage-left screen – except for one, who meanders across the stage as if in a moment of madness. The chosen dancer seems to give in to a flow of energy catalysed by Izzediou himself, who comes in singing with a powerful voice. Followed by all eight performers with percussion instruments, Izzediou leads them in a ritual cortege that ends in the audience.
Yet in Hors du monde (Out of the World), only Hassan Oumzili comes back onstage, along with guitar player Mathieu Gaborit (aka Ayato) both dressed in orange uniforms. In this second part of the trilogy, the piano-keys like rectangles turn black, but the dancer, who had started the previous piece, picks up again the whirling, smooth and combative gestures. Here the layers of dance styles cross his body more subtly as he goes from barefoot zapateado and taconeado to torso-driven folk dances, interspersed with breakdance, hip hop and krump figures. But after trying his hand at this introverted solo, movement does not seem to be enough. He wraps his head in a long crimson turban; behind the strange beauty of this swaddling rosebud is the desire to turn a blind eye on an unbearably violent world. But just as for Oedipus, who once bore the cost of this choice, blindness doesn’t lead him to clarity. Oumzili seems to be physically affected by major global conflicts and attacks of past decades indistinctly evoked on voice-over. The porosity between his body and the words culminates when he starts crawling and the sentence “I’m asking you to slow down the world” is said repeatedly in French. After unravelling his turban and lying down in an electric blue light, the sound of guitar and krakeb – Gnawa music instruments like castanet – seems to finally give peace in an internal, meditative acceptance of the surrounding atmosphere.
La Terre en transe (The Earth in a trance) eventually turns the trilogy upside down – literally first, as the piano-keys like rectangles are now hanging in a wave above the white carpet stage. In the back, a group of nine dancers, both men and women, and three singers are stamping. They seem to be moving inwardly, swept by their own rhythm. But kinaesthetic self-expression strikes the moment Taoufiq Izzediou bursts out of this moving nest and starts smoothly wandering in delicate geometrical patterns. Through his delicate repetitive balanced gestures, the 1990s French contemporary dance touch is obvious. Each dancer brings their own world to the dancefloor, turning it into a galaxy of free spinning spirits and bodies. From fierce convoluting arms to elegant arabesques and dislocated hips, the piece exudes a bracing, overflowing energy. By far the most eccentric character, Suzie Babin fully throws herself in the dance, racing, jumping and pausing with dauntless and weird faces, also wearing a mask with peacock feathers and sparkling fringes. After showing off the vibrant colours of their big artistic personalities, all dancers unite in a diagonal wave on trance music. Going forward and backwards, the endless impetus propels them in outer (stage) space. The piece slightly loses energy in the process, but rather than a conclusion, it gives a new impulse to the trilogy.
Idée
Abdel Mounim Elallami
Trained by Taoufiq Izzediou in the Moroccan contemporary dance company Anania, Abdel Mounim Elallami here stands on his own two feet. Intensely looking down at the spotlight, he seems to be taming the soft amber shade cutting out his body in the darkness. But as he starts moving towards the source of light, hips and shoulders undulating sensually, he might as well be seducing it. This ambivalent attitude amplifies throughout the first part of the solo. Pacing back and forth, he alternately pounds on his chest, cuddles an imaginary infant and hisses at his own growing shadow with his raised fist. But when he enunciates a one-syllable word, the intimate paradox of his persona starts falling apart. From that moment on, the choreography resorts to predictable patterns – pulling fake strings out of his joints and muscles, or quirky street dance moves – that end up going in circles. Elallami had a brilliant idea, but alas, it got lost in the process.
Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Radouan Mriziga
Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione is originally a set of twelve concertos by violinist Antonio Vivaldi. But rather than a contest between harmony and invention, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (currently in the middle of a psychological harassment and health endangerment affair) and Radouan Mriziga turn Vivaldi’s work into a hide-and-seek game. Their piece takes on the most famous quartet of concertos – the Four Seasons, a baroque hymn to nature – with four male dancers wearing colourful light sportswear. But the music pieces often take the form of Easter eggs. One of them might be hidden in the quiet opening choreography of flickering neon tubes covering the back and sides of the stage. Then, Boštjan Antončič lengthily roams in silence, unfolding Rosas’s dance vocabulary – geometrical patterns, extended arms and legs, precise swift rotations – before the Autumn starts playing. When the three other dancers step in, their synchronisation is highly unstable, as if they were four gravitating monads, messily and randomly tuning up only to disperse immediately after.
As the seasonal cycle goes, the choreography opens to a wider range of dance styles. Oddly enough, the piece spreads a touch of humour, through fake ice skating moves or bizarre noises – dog barks or loud snores – popping up in original music. But the piece really hits the mark when José Paulo dos Santos and Lav Crnčević play the Spring allegro through an astute stamping performance. Nassim Baddag shows off his mastery in breakdance and hip-hop figures and dos Santos nicely demonstrates his tap dance talent. It takes some time to join the party, but the artist’s impressive energy and skills win out.
Dancefloor
Michèle Murray / CCN – Ballet de Lorraine
Standing in the old stone staircases of the open-air Théâtre de l’Agora – once a convent – twenty-four dancers from CCN – Ballet de Lorraine get ready to hit the Dancefloor. Or so we might think seeing them in their jeans and glittery tops. But Michèle Murray’s work explores a paradoxical process involving improvisation within rigorous choreographic frames – that is, embracing constraints to find freedom. Originally 35 minutes long, the present piece extends to almost one hour and picks up on the implicit seduction codes of nightclubs. Pink, green, purple and orange lights shade the white carpet stage as the dancers slowly step in and out. On a slow dancing rhythm, men and women follow strict moving patterns, strike a pose from time to time, and jump from one combination of gestures to another. With these dancing canons, Murray’s work plays hard to get. But failing to cut to the chase, it gets caught at its own game, bogged down by long jumbled sequences of arabesques and sauts de chat, martial-arts lunges, triple jumps, dangling arms and hip-shaking, Single Ladies style. When the moves challenge gender-based norms – by making women hold men in fish dives, or having same-sex couples French kiss – it seems to miss the action. The eerie music echoing and the dancers’ insistent stares at the audience make the whole scene pretty cringe. Rather than provocative, the choreography feels dated, and sadly, off the beam.
Shiraz
Armin Hokmi
Berlin-based Iranian performer and choreographer Armin Hokmi creates a mise en abyme of festivals in the Hangar Théâtre. The piece he brought to Montpellier Danse, Shiraz, is inspired by the namesake arts festival from the late 1960s that shut down after the revolution in Iran. Already onstage as the audience enters, six dancers shuffle along on Persian trap music, slightly swinging the hips forward, a hand pointed at their forehead. Wearing colourful pastel shirts and plain jeans, they keep their gaze inward or their eyes closed. Never touching each other, they form sporadic geometrical motifs, then look away to continue their own meandering paths. The piece is quite demanding, both for artists and audience, but the slowness, baffling at first, soon becomes mesmerising. Once you accept it, a subtle kinaesthetic empathy grows regarding small details. With Aleksandra Petrushevska and Efthimios Moschopoulos in the lead, the performers intensify the effects of an emphasised step or a change of light or music. Hokmi cleverly disperses elements of surprise, adding a few jumps, folk dance and hip-hop steps that complexify the minimalistic gestures. Its historical background may not be visible for today’s Montpellier spectators, but the piece found a way to call on experiencing the present.
We learned a lot at our own funeral
Daina Ashbee
For rising Quebecoise artist Daina Ashbee, exploring the depths of humanity means diving into an arcane world. That her solo performance is inspired by the metaphysical and subconscious dimensions of a funeral rite comes as no surprise. While the Studio Bagouet blinds close, the piece starts by engaging with the audience, seated on all four sides of the stage, as female breakdancer Momo Shimada slowly walks across the room to invite all to hum in a bass voice. When the vocal throbbing reaches its peak, she disappears in a blackout – only the emergency exit sign enables to spot her wandering around. In the darkness, she stretches out thick mattresses and tarpaulin, whose rustling echoes a distant sound of backwash, before her body reappears in the gloomy light, lying in a sandpit. Staying still at first, Shimada slowly rolls over, striking a few poses on her way. Stopping her frail body centerstage, she painstakingly and repeatedly hits the mat with her elbow and knee. This dolorous sequence gives way to an impressive silent breakdance solo, with headstands, freezes and swift stabbed windmills. Meanwhile, as shrill music rises and turns into a cry from beyond the grave, another woman, stark naked, slowly crawls on the sand surrounding the stage. Besides the overall strangeness of the scene, the point of this experience of physical and spiritual pain remains obscure. The blinds reopen to the light of day, but We learned a lot at our own funeral keeps us largely in the dark.
Looking back at this five-day journey in Montpellier Danse, it occurred to me that the Agora acts as a catalyst for dance to go beyond limits. The pieces I attended shared a common desire to break down the barriers between choreographic styles and genres, through humour, abstraction or provocation. In spite of the many changes of directions ahead, both already well-known and emerging artists stand strong by challenging norms, confronting views and creating new paths on the international dance scene. Let’s hope the festival holds on tightly to the promise of this bright future. ●
