1981's creation.

During her time as director of the CNDC Angers, a post she held from 1981, Viola Farber founded a new European company. Unlike in New York, she never really achieved the hoped-for wide recognition. With an impressive commitment, the American choreographer created no less than nine works in two years. She was not content simply to pass on her tried-and-tested American repertoire to the six French performers in the ten-member company.
 Villa-Nuage intrigued the American critics who were able to see it, and who saw in it an attempt to compose with the theatrical qualities of European dancers, unfamiliar with the modern American abstract tradition. The chosen extract shows a rehearsal. So, without costume, and before the characters have been fully developed, one can already see in the gestures themselves a definite loading of expressiveness: holding poses, accentuation of modulations and inflexions of the gesture shape, decorative miniaturisation in the carriage of the arms and use of hands. Much is made openly of gender attitudes, both masculine and feminine, in sharp contrast with the asexual neutrality normally characteristic of American abstraction.

Source: Gérard Mayen

Born in Germany, Viola Farber emigrated to Texas with her family at the age of seven. Coming across Merce Cunningham by chance, she became one of his dancers most in the limelight, leaving him the day she could no longer bear the classic public-interpreter relationship. At the same time, she followed the classical lessons of Margaret Craske, “of effective harshness”, and of Enrico Cechetti, and, from the outset, stood out from the universe of Martha Graham and “from her proud suffering”. While she acknowledges that what touches her most with a dancer, is effort, she adds that, without grace, that effort would be meaningless. Overturning the conventional idea that expects a good dancer to adapt to all styles, she reminds us that each technique muscles and models the body differently.