Speechless Voices

Speechless Voices Creation 2018 photo : Louise Roy Cie Greffe/ Cindy Van Acker Case Postale 264 1211 Genève 8 www.ciegreffe.org • Contact diffusion Tutu Production/Véronique Maréchal [email protected] T. + 41 22 310 07 62 • Contact administration Sophie Mercier and Cindy Janiaud [email protected] T. + 41 22 310 07 62 Distribution Choreography : Cindy Van Acker Dance: Stéphanie Bayle, Matthieu Chayrigues, Laure Lescoffi, Raphaëlle Teicher, Rudi van der Merwe, Daniela Zaghini Music : Mika Vainio, J. S. Bach Sound : Samuel Pajand Scenography : Victor Roy Lighting design: Cindy Van Acker and Victor Roy Dramaturgie: Michèle Pralong Costumes and jewellery: Marie Artamonof Lighting technician: Gautier Teuscher Paintings: Eric Vuille Administration : Cindy Janiaud Diffusion : Tutu Production Production : Cie Greffe Coproduction : Steps, Festival de Danse du Pour-cent culturel Migros, Expedition Suisse : Kaserne Basel, Dampfzentrale Bern, Theater Chur, Gessnerallee Zürich, Théâtre de Vidy Lausanne, and CCN de Rillieux-la-Pape, direction Yuval PICK, dans le cadre du dispositif Accueil-Studio avec le soutien du Théâtre des Îlets, centre dramatique national de Montluçon, région Supports : Loterie Romande, Société Suisse des Auteurs, Fondation du Jubilé, Fondation Stanley Thomas Johnson, Sophie und Karl Binding Stiftung The Compagnie Greffe has a joint support agreement with the City of Geneva, the Canton of Geneva and Pro Helvetia for the period 2009-2020. Tour . Creation at Théâtre de Vidy, Lausanne (Switzerland), April 13th - 15th 2018 . Salle du Lignon, Vernier (Switzerland), April 17th 2018 . Kaserne, Basel (Switzerland), April 20-21st 2018 . Dampfzentrale Bern (Switzerland), April 25th 2018 . Gessnerallee, Zurich (Switzerland), April 27th 2018 . TPR, Moutier (Switzerland), April 29th 2018 . LAC, Lugano (Switzerland), May 1st 2018 . Théâtre de Coire (Switzerland), May 5th 2018 Residencies . From 29 th of January till 4th of February in the Dampfzentrale, Bern . From 23rd of March till 30th of March at the Montluçon CDN . From 3rd till 12th of April at Théâtre de Vidy, Lausanne Speechless Voices Strijd for Mika Perhaps it would be necessary to mention the artistic inspirations which Cindy Van Acker surrounded herself with for her last creations : Nietzsche, Nijinski, Nono, Chlebnikov, de Bruyckere, Lutz. All, philosopher, dancer, writer, composer, visual artist, photographer, have faith in the political power which can be carried by an aesthetic action. Everyone works on a way to throw one’s body into battle. If the penultimate solo of Cindy Van Acker, Ion, was almost called strijd, the fight in Flemish, all her pieces could carry this title. And Speechless Voices would then be a strijd for Mika. Mika Vainio : Finnish composer of electronic music who collaborated many times with Cindy Van Acker, who died accidentally in April 2017. This disappearance left a hole in the body of the choreographer (And the Hole in my body will be black / like a Tuft of Horsehair, says a dancer). The performance she planned to create with him became a salute to a friend, dived into darkness, a call for consolation. A choreographic poem, pictorially set up, for six dancers, with the music of the departed. "We had intuitive, intense communication, often without words. We had a common voice which arose elsewhere.” Speechless Voices seeks to create, through dance, a shared language to fill the space, go through the body of the spectators, to connect to the other. Upon entering this new group piece, the choreographer met another member of the resistance: Pier Paolo Pasolini. She first found the sidereal line of his character Accatone when he falls off his bike and dies on a sidewalk in the Roman suburbs : "Sto bene." " I am well. ". This allowed the choreographer to enter into a relationship to death that is not affliction only. And she also found the Medea of the Italian poet: a barbarous, inflexible figure, painted like a firefly in an eternal survival. Who will give her the power of the rituals she sought. If the movement is here conceived from the inside of the electronic sounds of Mika Vainio, it is also installed in a clear reliance to painting: that of the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. Speechless Voices places the dancers into a new narrative reality. The usual qualities of Cindy Van Acker's movement - slowness, geometry and abstraction - are colored by figural, readable images, expressive stases. A human community has entered the picture, seeking through the body to ritualize absence and presence, loneliness and relationship, in order to transmute them. The mechanical, vegetable or animal extensions that vitalize most of the Belgian choreographer's pieces thus encounter clearer anthropocentric energies. Producing a dance and dancers who come to put enigmatic sarabandes in motion as pulled out of the paintings of the artist. Visual surroundings The scenography of Speechless Voices is inspired by some of the backdrops of the contemporary Belgian painter Michaël Borremans. This places the six dancers in a situation of figures carried away, encrusted, as captured in a pictorial environment that is image. Even when they dance. Borremans has for masters Velasquez, Goya, Manet, and is strongly in a reference / reverence to the greats of painting. This puts the choreographic piece also in a continuity that is evocative of a certain History of the arts. Borremans : "I have always painted culture. Even if I paint a human silhouette, it is a representation of a human silhouette that I want to paint. In my opinion, painting nature is very, very old fashioned. " Thus, where, in Cindy Van Acker's previous pieces, the performers were figures determined by the constraints of the scenography, they are here the raw material of visual production : the dancers become, in a sense, the scenography. A number of archaic rituals have also served as a source of inspiration, both for the composition of the dance and for the creation of jewelery and costumes by the Belgian artist Marie Artamonoff. Rituals, a relationship with the barbarian and the civilized strongly inspired by the masterpiece of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea. Finally, lighting will be worked on by the choreographer and the scenographer. The music It is when, last year, I lived a new strong artistic encounter, with Christian Lutz, that I thought about the collaborations that are already part of my life. I'm really lucky to have met Romeo Castellucci, Victor Roy, Mika Vainio, Myriam Gourfink. They are powerful artistic relations, of rare evidence and complicity, very rare, which make the deep layers of my being vibrate. I have to live them, honor them, invest them, make them grow. In the spring of 2016, I could no longer imagine that the collaboration with Mika Vainio would stop where we left it with Diffraction in 2011. We had to meet again. So I asked him to join me for the musical creation of Speechless Voices in April 2018, which he accepted without hesitation and with joy. Then on April 12, 2017, Mika had an accident that cost him his life. I have no more words. Only a hole in my body. Speechless Voices could then be A Hole In My Body. The premiere will take place on April 13, 2018, the day following the anniversary of his death. The piece will be dedicated to him. But this is not enough. I attended Mika's funeral and there was a very powerful common desire among the people that Mika was gathering, the desire to continue to have him live through his music. A few weeks later, Rikke Lund- green, his partner, tells me that she was diving into all the music Mika left behind: the one ready to be edited, the bulk one, studies ... She tells me that I have to feel free to use Mika's music for my future productions and she thinks it would be great if I did I could never fill the hole in my body but his music can continue to set it in motion. I had withdrawn his name from the distribution with distress, today it is by engaging my whole body and with an intimate appreciation that I re-inscribed his name. I am in the mountains just as I write these words, to listen to his music. I want to make it go back into the cells of my body, live my relationship to it. To compose with it then, make it collective. Speechless Voices is marked by his death, the project includes this death, pays tribute to him. From this reality, I want to build, produce what I wanted to achieve with him, that is to say, forty mi- nutes of repetitive, tireless, complex dance, built from the movements that have made up the individual universe of each scene from the beginning. For this, I think I have to Mika Vainio appeal today to another composer in order to write a piece made to measure with the material of Mika. Or not. It will depend on what I discover in the inheritance that he left us. Maybe even there will be a piece already carved that can carry this dance of the end. I always said that Mika gives body to space with his music, sculpting it. With his sounds, he sculpts the void around bodies and movements, he makes it visible, alive. Mika is no longer there, but I will leave space for his music to continue to sculpt bodies and space. We communicated deeply, strongly, in a common voice, but without words. This body is established to signify "Cindy Van Acker’s dance is as abstract as it is intense. Through a mastered expertise of the rythm, a savant practice of combinatorics and an unprecedented research on movement in unexpected series, she’s bringing her performers to an acute focus on gesture itself. The quality of movement generated by this process unravels an incredible, intense body, which has nothing to do anymore with the body as we see it.

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