A scene from Crocodile, by Martin Harriague and Emilie Leriche, with Ensemble 0. © Stéphane Bellocq

review

Le temps d’aimer la danse – Biarritz 2024

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A scene from Crocodile, by Martin Harriague and Emilie Leriche, with Ensemble 0. © Stéphane Bellocq
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Loving dance is a matter of time – and place – at the Biarritz festival’s 34th edition

This year, the French dance community celebrates 40 years of National Choreographic Centres (CCN). The project, initiated by the French Ministry for Culture, was meant to structure dance creation, circulation and transmission in France and abroad by providing choreographers and company directors with a budget and workspaces in different parts of mainland France. Today, the nineteen CCN each develop a wide range of dance styles (from ballet to hip hop) with their own repertory. So when Thierry Malandain came to run CCN – Malandain Ballet Biarritz in southwestern France in 1998, it was a great opportunity to shape his neoclassical style, with 22 dancers working full-time – but it also meant becoming director of a dance festival launched four years earlier: Le Temps d’aimer la danse. And where better to kick off this year’s festivities than a two-week annual event by the ocean, where dance in every shape and form is welcome?

A stitch in time…

Though I only attended the first weekend of the festival’s 34th edition, a lot was already going on. My journey started with South Korean dancer and choreographer Sun-A Lee’s Cover pieces, a dance trilogy going from Un Cover to Re Cover via Dis Cover. With eerie music echoing, the dim-lit stage of Théâtre Le Colisée reveals a mysterious figure seated on a chair, dressed in black except for a billy goat Venetian-style mask. This zoomorphic silhouette slowly contorts her knuckle, wrist, hip and knee joints, and as she slides down to the ground her abrupt bends, stretches and stomps, resonating with the electronic soundscape, seem to nod to Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz. But standing on both feet under stroboscopic lights, she conjures up a more Satanic vision. This solo could stand on its own as an incarnate and spiritual exploration of anthropo-zoomorphic corporeality.

Sun-A Lee, Un Cover. © Caroline de Otero
Sun-A Lee, Un Cover. © Caroline de Otero

But when the stage curtain shuts out of the blue and reopens on a trio of performers standing in a triangle – the opening of Dis Cover – the mystery effect melts away. The dancers start moving one by one, very slowly, to each spread a block of grey clay in geometric patterns onstage pushing the elasticity of time to its limits. The stage curtain shuts again to prepare the final part of the trilogy, where Lee joins the trio to Re Cover. The quartet takes up a rhythmic motion again to dance round a golden empty bowl, as in a water purification ritual. But after one and a half hours, the trilogy, alas, ends up treading water.


From Le Colisée, most of the audience raced to La Gare du Midi for the next show, where Taiwanese choreographer Po-Cheng Tsai also seemed to have got lost in time. After his widely praised work Alice, loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s tale, his new collaboration with the Bern Ballett Don Quixote intended to revisit both Cervantes’ masterpiece and Petipa’s ballet. But apart from a few touches of Minkus music, very few – if any – references to these works were obvious. Instead, Tsai summoned enigmatic characters: one figure enveloped from head to toe in a red velvet suit, another all in red – lover or evil twin, I couldn’t tell – as a creepy dark-hooded silhouette with a scarlet circle-shaped light for a face, plus seventeen dancers merely dressed in black. For over an hour, the performers run, dive, jump, swirl and spin in a three-wall all-white stage with scattered geometric blocs, rushing in and out of hidden doors. They have great technical skills, but their comings and goings do not seem to lead them anywhere. Sometimes a spark of genius emerges in the movement – as when two rows of assembled hands form mirrored undulating waves – but mostly the choreography seems to fall into hackneyed patterns, vaguely reminiscent of some Freudian psychodrama. This is especially striking in the acrobatic pas de deux where lustful lifts prevail, and the female dancer is strictly manipulated by her male partner’s embrace. By that point, Tsai has drifted away from Don Quixote and Dulcinea, leaving a show with much display and little structure.


Skorpeidon company perform Athena by Brice larrieu alis Skorpion. © Stéphane Bellocq
Skorpeidon company perform Athena by Brice larrieu alis Skorpion. © Stéphane Bellocq

Less is more

On the first Saturday of the festival, the most successful works were the shortest, starting with Compagnie Skorpeidon’s Athena. This fifteen-minute performance, created by hip hop star Brice Larrieu aka Skorpion, featured five young breakdancers, all in black, performing outdoors at the Fronton Pétricot, under the sun and maybe even under the patronage of the ancient Greek Goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicraft. The choreography, while apparently simple, is nicely mastered by the performers. Mostly based on sequences of upside-down poses, swinging arms, martial stomps, backwards leans and forward kicks, the moves are cadenced and remarkably synced. Above all, their momentum is generous. Teasing each other and sticking together, the quintet forms a lively brotherhood, spreading good vibes and positive community strength. Unpretentious, but promising – let’s hope they keep going with the flow.

Straight after was Marco da Silva Ferreira’s duet Fantasie Minor, again outdoors on the Casino’s paved square. Right from the start, the piece draws witty dance-music parallels, as the two dancers (a man and woman dressed like twins) perform on an electro-pop remix of Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands. Both duets jump in the piece as one and start to play. The dancers may be wearing dark caps and socks over their sneakers and open white sportswear, but the choreography is an embroidery of dance styles. For about half an hour, they jump and leap from one sequence of steps to another, mixing stomps, twists, freezes, slides and stretches, side by side or face to face. If they take a step back, it’s only to take a big jump forward. From popping to voguing by way of hip hop and breakdance, the cheeky pair even nod to tap dance, ballet and cancan. The two are obviously a good fit for each other: body language and eye-to-eye communication speak for themselves. Joyful and nicely balanced, Fantasie Minor stands on the edge.


Martin Harriague and Emilie Leriche, Crocodile

While Biarritz is the host city of the festival, certain events also take place in various towns of the French Basque region. Thus, on the same Saturday, another dance-music double duet walked into the Théâtre Michel Portal in neighbouring Bayonne, for Crocodile. A collaboration between Martin Harriague, choreographer and director of the Ballet de l’Opéra du Grand Avignon, and freelance performer and creator Emilie Leriche, along with two musicians from Ensemble 0. As the latter start playing Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato on their marimbas on each side of the stage, the dim light reveals Harriague seated on a small white wall in the back, facing a long vertical banner with rows of squares. In this contemplative, intimate atmosphere, Leriche walks from the forestage and makes the first move towards her partner. Right away, the chemistry between the two is undeniable, yet they only approach each other progressively. For a long time, their arms and legs cross, lean, wrap and open without ever touching each other: everything lies in the eye contact. Then little by little, their skins meet, and from soft and gentle their contact becomes abrupt and pressing. Alter egos and soulmates at the same time, they constantly try to tame or break free from each other’s embrace. In perfect symbiosis with the overpowering melody, the duet unveils an impressive construction of refined gestures, smoothly layered and deepened through repetition. Even if they sometimes push the patterns slightly too far, every move unveils a meaningful shade. Exploring the spiritual and physical dimensions of love, Harriague and Leriche make dance a self-evident language.


Manuel Liñán, ¡Viva!

Back in Biarritz at night, Spanish dance was back on the bill, though light years from the previous Don Quixote. In ¡Viva!, queer flamenco artist Manuel Liñán dragged along with him six male flamenco dancers dressed as female bailaoras on the Casino stage. The piece, premiered in Madrid in 2019, falls within an approach developed by Liñán for over a decade, along with various artists in Spain, to deconstruct gender norms in flamenco dance. Here, the happy bunch taking over the stage would be the flamenco version of The Trocks. For over an hour, Liñán and his troupe take turns at hammering the ground (or an upside-down bench) with thick heels in fierce zapateados, pastiching the so-called ‘Spanish dances’ featured in academic ballets, and lifting their peers’ spirits with cheerful applauses and cries. Sure, there is a lot of showing off, but the performers find a nice balance between high-flying creative dance acts and comic burlesque sketches. From their cadenced maestria emerges a special bond between the musicians and singers. After they all dance a caracola in batas de cola – long colourful gowns with trains and flounces – and mantones – colorful fringed shawls – each dancer takes off his dress to reveal his prosthetic jumpsuit. Laying themselves bare like this is testament to their sincere and profound love for flamenco. As the light goes off on Liñán cuddling his blond wig, ¡Viva! resonates as intense and joyfully transgressive flamenco.

Lost and found

On Sunday, the mysterious dark atmosphere of the Théâtre du Colisée was the stage for Burial of the bark by Japanese-Navarrese dancer Akira Yoshida. This contemporary and urban dance piece created in 2022, features a lonely man wandering around with a wheeled suitcase, a toddler’s chair and a notebook. At the crossroads between dance and theatre, the work’s speech and gestures, captivatingly, always seem to get in the way of each other.


Akira Yoshida, Burial of the Bark

With an apparently unstable state of mind, on the edge of psychotic delirium, Yoshida displays an obvious mastery of his body. Like a mirage between a faint golden light and the shadows, his swift, sharp, frenetic and flexible moves seem to bear the hallmark of Belgium’s Peeping Tom company, with which he occasionally performs. Drawing figures in thin air that words can’t express, he also speaks Spanish in a stammering muffled voice, evoking unclear childhood memories – something involving his brother, his granny and bolognese pastas – then sings and even engages his suitcase in a deep, intimate conversation about their ups and downs in life. More than a simple prop, the suitcase becomes a fellow traveller, with whom he fights and tenderly holds on to. As Yoshida grabs this partner by the handle and starts whirling with it in silence, their duet even reminds of the famous sensual pas de deux from Angelin Preljocaj’s Le Parc. There are one or two moments in the fifty-minute piece when the conversation seems to get stuck, But with this sensitive and synesthetic work, the performer makes a perfectly controlled loose cannon.


Kor’sia, Mont Ventoux

This time around, the schedule allowed for a walk by the beach to admire the sunset on the way from Le Colisée to La Gare du Midi, where Spanish-Italian contemporary dance collective Kor’sia had transposed Mont Ventoux. The title refers to a mountain over 6,000 feet high in southeast France, which became famous after Tuscan poet Petrarch assertedly ascended it in 1336. For nearly seven hundred years, it has inspired countless painters and writers. But dancers, not so much – so for Kor’sia’s artistic directors Mattia Russo and Antonio di Rossa to make the metaphorical ascension sounded like a promising concept. At first, the dancers’ silhouettes appear slowly from behind a glass wall. Like miniature figures in a diorama, in light shirts and underwear, they crouch, slide, duel, climb on top of each other and fall back down. Their wild telluric gestures match the rocky scenery and brown-orange ambience. But so far, they might as well be dancing on Mars. In fact, the snowy Mont Ventoux makes a brief appearance on the backdrop only to disappear above a plain grey wall. In this neutral gloomy atmosphere, the dancers start racing against time – without seeming to know where to. Dragging in a few props (a ladder, a shopping cart and a suit of armour) and visual effects (strobe lighting mostly), the dance sequences feature harmonious ensembles and pas de deux, showing off the performers’ sharp technical skills and physicality. But the overall work lacks structure to hold it together. Kor’sia’s artists are full of raw strength but have a way to go to the top of the mountain.

Sea, rain and sun

Just as in French temps means ‘weather’ as well as ‘time’, loving dance at Le Temps d’aimer was not only a matter of time, but of forecast. This year’s festival had quite a wet start – but the Sunday showers did not stop dozens of people of all ages from showing up on the Grande Plage promenade in Biarritz for the traditional ‘Gigabarre’, an outsize outdoor ballet barre session lead by Xenia Wiest, choreographer and director of Germany’s Ballett X Schwerin. Nor did it stop the dancers from Ballett X Schwerin and Manuel Liñán’s company from performing o rehearsals in the Public Garden on Saturday and Monday before performing in the theatres at night. Luckily, Biarritz traditional dance ensemble Amalabak eta Seme joined together with Saltoka musicians and amateurs in a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon to dance mutxiko and fandango on the Casino’s paved square. Le Temps d’aimer la danse certainly has much to offer. We’ll see how dance can weather the tests of time. ●


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Biarritz, France
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www.letempsdaimer.com
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