Mingling images, texts and dance, Bryan Campbell’s pieces draw from  visual culture to examine the bodily and cognitive mechanisms which they  signal towards. Here, inspired as much by the American square dance as  more contemporary social dances, he confronts the geometric rigour of  the quadrille with the expressiveness of a free dance, or the  abstraction of composition with the organicity of gestures. He thus  rethinks the dividing line between pure form and sensitive experience so  as to deconstruct the social lines of power which are translated into  choreographic conventions. Little by little, the dancers of SQUARE DANCE evoke  and navigate between other energies which choreography bodies –erotic  energies, biopolitical energies, pharmaceutical energies – and thus  cross over states that summon up pleasure and alienation, as well as the  power to act and subjugation. It all draws out a testimony to disturbed  ambiguities of contemporary rituals seeking for a sweeping intensity,  in which the body both flourishes and examines itself.

Source: program of the CND

After training at the Tisch School of the Arts at the University of New  York and at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, Bryan Campbell  now lives and works in Paris. He has danced for Loïc Touzé, Emmanuelle  Huynh, Olivia Grandville, Ambra Senatore, Jocelyn Cottencin as well as  Marco Berrettini, has been the assistant of Jacob Peter Kovner and  Antonija Livingstone, and has created several pieces, including the  series of solos Seven Activities of the Historical Object, the quartet Hares on the Mountain, MARVELOUS or Research for the Quadruped Protagonist, conceived as part of the Masters course exerce at the CCN of Montpellier.

Source: program of the CND

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.).