Choreographic comedy

The work “Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam” brings together the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the serious and the playful. The coincidence of death brought together three great masters of dance, in a single month in 2009: the king of pop, Michael Jackson, the queen of the Tanztheater, Pina Bausch and the emperor of the “Dance Revolution”, Merce Cunningham.

Foofwa d'Imobilité evokes them through a parodist and contemporary approach of Dante's “Divine Comedy” whilst reinventing the Dance of Death that emphasizes the vanity of social distinctions. As always, Foofwa d'Imobilité uses all means available to bring life to this shadowy world: he imitates, mimes, copies, compiles and reinvents the wrongs and the foibles of these beings just as much as their inspirational genius.

Updating: September 2011

Dancer, performer, choreographer, dance educator & artistic director of the Neopost Foofwa Company.

Foofwa occupies a pivotal position between tradition and innovation  in the choreographic field. Dancer at the Stuttgart Ballet and then at  the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, choreographer since 1998. Since 2000  with his company Neopost Foofwa, he has been studying the relationship  between dance and sport and invented the “Dancerun”, a hybrid activity  between running and dancing over several kilometers (2003). He also  studies the relationship between audience and choreographic work in The Making of Spectacles (2008) and Quai du Sujet (2007); the digital body in Media Vice Versa (2002), Avatar dance series, Second Live series (videos) and BodyToys (2007); the historicity of the dancing body in Descendance (2000), Le Show (2001), MIMESIX (2005), Benjamin de Bouillis (2005), Musings (2009), Pina Jackson in Mercemoriam (2009), and Histoires Condansées  (2011). He has been commissioned by the Nederlands Dans Theater II, the  Ballet de Berne, the Ballet Junior de Genève, in 2010 by the SACD and  the Festival d’Avignon with Au Contraire, in 2012 by the  Théâtre de la Fenice. He has been supported annually by the Geneva and  Swiss public authorities since 2002, received the Leenaards Foundation  grant in 1999 and the prize of the prestigious Foundation for  Contemporary Arts in New York in 2009. He won, among others, the  Lausanne Prize in 1987, the Bessie Award of New York in 1995 “in  recognition of outstanding creative achievement; for the innovation,  speed and clarity of dance that galvanized a remarkable Cunningham  company”, the Swiss Prize for Dance and Choreography in 2006 because  “Foofwa occupies a pivotal position between tradition and the  avant-garde” and the Swiss Dance Prize category “outstanding dancer” in  2013: “Foofwa d’Imobilité challenges us and breaks with convention. His  artistic radicalism is based on the exceptional technical ability he has  repeatedly demonstrated in Switzerland and abroad. His works often go  against contemporary minimalism.” They are rather “surmodern”, in the  sense of Marc Augé, because they are linked to the overabundance of  information in our contemporary societies. His most recent pieces or  performances focus on a practice of “being-here-present” that allows the  works to be permeable to unpredictability, spontaneity and  authenticity. Between 2015 and 2018, he led in close collaboration with  Jonathan O’Hear the Utile/Inutile project, a vast undertaking centered  on creation, pedagogy, mediation, historiography and choreographic  succession: /Utile: Redonner Corps (2015), /Inutile: Don Austerity (2015-16), In/Utile: Incorporate (2017) & /Unitile  (2018). Since 2018, he has been experimenting with his company a new  way of creating & touring with the GLocal project (18-present) in  order to produce and disseminate his works based on ethical and social  values. The Dancewalk, with its multiple artistic collaborators and  partner structures, is its flagship production.

Source and more information

foofwa.com

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.).