A chamber opera for two dancers and four singers: Air, composed by Vincent Dupont in 2013, places the audience at the heart of the dialogue between movement and music. Inspired by Les Tambours d’avant,  a documentary shot by Jean Rouch in Niger in 1971, the choreographer  reinvents the final scene of this short film – an old woman starting a  dance of possession, wrapped in a blanket – to imagine another ritual  relating to his own culture.
The dancer Aline Landreau accompanies Vincent Dupont in this exploration  that gives pride of place to the voice, under the musical direction of  Valérie Joly. The singers are positioned behind the audience; breathing  rhythms and litanies, based on texts by the poet Charles Pennequin, make  the air vibrate on either side of the room, with the dancers joining in  the vocal composition. Attracted by material of an incantatory nature  and fond of crossing disciplines, in Air Vincent Dupont opens the possibility of a sensitive and sensorial experience.

Source: programme of the CND

Performer and choreographer Vincent Dupont is an associated artist at the Maison de la Danse and the Lyon Biennale de la Danse for the 2023-2024 season. 

A multidisciplinary artist, Dupont combines diverse art forms into choreography. Theatre, film and art installations all have a place in his singular work: a dizzyingly surreal blend of the archaic with the ultramodern. In Incantus and Air, the dancers’ breath is played through speakers, melding with the voices of a contemporary music ensemble. Amplifying the dancers’ breath, heightens the reverberations of their movements through the space. 

Dupont draws on the visual arts (Jachères improvisations is inspired by an installation by artist Stan Douglas), and the dramatic arts (Mettre en pièce(s) is a free adaptation of the play Offending the Audience). His work is both radical and transgressive. In in Hauts Cris (miniature), Dupont sits alone in a cluttered, bourgeois living room, until his rage boils over into destruction. In Refuge, an allegory of duality, two manual labourers, stuck performing repetitive movements, sabotage the machine that alienates them. 

In 5 apparitions successives Vincent Dupont shifts between different mediums, blurring the line between the visible and the invisible and experimenting with a diversity of images: analogue, digital and even subliminal. With pieces like Stéréoscopia to No reality now, he creates immersive installations that warp audience perception. Condensed from fragments of dreams, his work is an investigation of the line between reality and fiction, image and life, that cumulates in the mind of an audience aroused to heightened sensations. 

Alix de Morant 

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.).