Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau present a new work, with Japanese influences, combining dance, text and film. What will the bodies, the words and the images allow us to see? Let's open our eyes!

An old dancer goes to Japan to research Spinoza's treatise on the rainbow. Spinoza is the perfect philosopher for dancers, having developed a “practical philosophy” in which the body is very present.

Japan makes an impression on the dancer in several different ways. As she does not speak Japanese and the majority of the Japanese speak only their own language, she devotes herself to tirelessly observing the country, its shapes and its details. She questions things, gradually becoming more perceptive. Little by little, she starts to do what she sees; she is inspired to finally do something different and relies on Spinoza's treatise to physically drag her gaze somewhere else.

“Les yeux dans les yeux” is the performance of this adventure.

Further information

Mille plateaux associés Website

Updating: June 2013

Choreographer, performer and researcher of dance, Geisha Fontaine began her career as a ballet dancer, then trained under Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais in New York and Hideyuki Yano in Paris. She then set up the centre de danse contemporaine (Centre for Contemporary Dance) Le Dansoir in Toulouse and worked as a dancer for several contemporary dance companies. In 1998, she founded the Mille Plateaux Associés dance company with Pierre Cottreau. She was the winner of the Villa Médicis – Hors les murs residence in Japan in 2010.

Awarded her art PhD from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Geisha Fontaine was published by the Centre national de la danse (National Dance Centre) in 2004 (a book which has been translated into Spanish and Japanese), while “Tu es le danseur”, 2008 and “Là”, 2009, were published by Micadanses. She has collaborated on several joint publications, notably those published by CNRS. She is invited regularly as an artist and a researcher to various universities in France and abroad (Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Santiago…).

Further information

Mille plateaux associés website

Updated : june 2013

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).