If art opposes the empirical through the element of form, (…) the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. What are taken to be the purest forms can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic detail to content.
– Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
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For SQUARE DANCE, I am interested in the place where the geometrical shakes hands with the libidinal and relational. To borrow a word from Adorno, I am curious to examine different situations in which movements sourced from intentions, behaviors, and social practices become sedimented into choreography. The fabric of our relationships is woven in movement - the directions we turn our heads and bodies, the ways we couple up, disperse, clump into groups, push someone away, take someone close, wander off by ourselves. How does choreography, on stage but also in the movements of daily life, reveal the social impulses at work within an individual organism and the networks of relationships in a group? Choreography: a cartography of relationships.
SQUARE DANCE will be an exploration of the geometries of the social sphere, examining and searching for inspiration from two choreographies that both map and construct social relationships: US American square dancing and contemporary clubbing. While the former, a folk dance based on an intricate system of couplings and uncouplings, delights in a linear / Euclidean geometry, the latter is marked by more amorphous forms and pathways, in which a dancer, guided by a dialogue between pleasure and social custom, navigates proximities to or distances from different individuals, groups, architectural features, and sound and light environments.
It can be easy to cast square dancing as some heteronormative machine, and night club dancing as a utopian playground for liberation technology. They are these things. At the same time, their coexistence might permit us to see unexpected parallels in their pleasures and restrictions.
SQUARE DANCE will be an ode to the coexistence of differences, an exhaustive encyclopedia of groove, of love, of smelly sweaty armpits and altered states, stimulation, excitement, frustration, discipline both imposed and requested, sleepiness, boredom, and reawakening, at any and all levels of intensity.
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Cast
Concept Bryan Campbell
Dance Katerina Andreou, Bryan Campbell, Jule Flierl, Gaëtan Rusquet
Light Yannick Fouassier
Sound / Technic Éric Yvelin
Set construction Pierre Bouglé-Atelier PanoramaRoad
Outside Eye Jacob Peter Kovner
Thanks to Arthur Eskenazi, Bryana Fritz, Timo Hateau, Myrto Katsiki, Olivia Lioret
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Production déléguée Météores
Administration, production Charlotte Giteau
Production, development Sandrine Barrasso
Touring management Anaïs Guilleminot
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Coproduction
Charleroi danse ; Le Gymnase / CDCN Roubaix Hauts-de-France La Place de la Danse ; CDCN Toulouse / Occitanie ; CCN de Tours / Direction Thomas Lebrun ; CN D Centre national de la danse
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With the financial support of
CCN de Caen en Normandie / direction Alban Richard ; SPEDIDAM ; ADAMI
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With the support for residencies of
Songo/Stéréolux (Nantes) ; Montévidéo, Centre d’Art ; L'Echangeur CDCN
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Touring
March 25, 2019 – Festival Le Grand Bain – Le Gymnase CDCN – Roubaix – pre-premiere
April 3, 2019 – Festival Leg – Charleroi danse – Bruxelles (Belgique) – premiere
June 24 & 25, 2019 – Festival Camping – Centre national de la danse – Pantin
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