Michael is no longer there, all that remains is the sense of wonder of a dreamlike world populated by dancing phantoms, look-alikes that he has filled our imaginations with. All that remains is the sense of wonder before the planetary icon. His absence from the stage, this emptiness is illustrated here by the absence of this music overflowing with memory, especially when you wish to bring the uniqueness of the artist out from behind the clichés and fantasies. This absence in the production portrays the uniqueness of a presence, a presence that the choreographer and her team imagined, the aesthetics of a passing, a disappearance. In particular this pleasure of dance that burns in old and young alike, that creates these emotional urges that would be the symptom of the contemporary individual viewed in the multitude.

So, who would this creature be? A brilliant artist or the absolute masterpiece of show business? Our pleasure is also to enter this post-humanity that wishes to re-enchant the world, where utopias failed: to recreate, on Earth, the green paradise of our childhood loves.

Some may say that the king of pop is the symptom of ultra-liberalism which would have reduced the individual to just ‘be' instinctually. Let' leave the question open. All that remains is the pleasure of this dance that invites our icons from Nijinsky to James Brown and brings together their aesthetics in a single electric current.

An icon cannot be easily defined, mystery is her/his irradiating charm. And our pleasure!

Michel Jacques

Press quotes

Interview with Raphaëlle Delaunay on The Dancing Plague website

Updating: April 2012

‘I rarely turn round to see if I'm being followed. If someone is dancing behind me, they're dancing in my shadow. For a long time I didn't want to see the traces I left behind me. I still don't know what that fear was. Maybe it was the need to escape being classified, identified.

Always ahead!

And then this digital breakaway makes me want to share the route I'm lucky enough to have. It's a journey of instinct, of the desire to constantly discover new terrain, new bodies, new ways of doing and thinking.

Being here and there in a world that constantly asks you to identify yourself seemed to me to be an opportunity: an opportunity for richness, eclecticism, variety of forms and curiosity.

I started at the age of 10 at the Paris Opera, which I left at 20 to dance with Pina Bausch, then with Alain Platel, then... then... then... my own creations with themes as different as... and right up to this work on icons such as Joséphine Baker, Michael Jackson or Beyoncé.

It's this diversity that I want to tell you about in movement, in the joy of dance, in the shifts that my life as a dancer takes me on.

This is the moment I'm offering you, the moment of a body going through very different, not to say contradictory, states, the moment of a body searching... And with a single aim, to continue to discover and nourish my insatiable desire to dance. ’

Raphaëlle Delaunay

Source and more information: https://www.raphaelledelaunay.fr/

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.).