Cette pièce est dédiée à Marguerite Wylde (1950-2017)

«To strike the ground with our feet, pound the sacred earth, to communicate with the spirits, to make the body and the earth resonate with the proclamation of our existence in the world, our resistance, our rebellion, stomping to wake the dead, tapping like the deaf, hoping for ghosts, to vibrate, to shake our living matter, to stand as a shield against hidden death, to chant our tiny lives.»

The background to this project: a foreign perspective, a journey of discovery in the footsteps of the composer Moondog, to the heart of the Aboriginal reserves of Canada and North America. A pretext to discover Native American culture, a childhood fantasy that has endured into adulthood, a story that is both fascinating and shameful.

Ultimately, it’s a story at the heart of today’s appalling reality.

Aim: to share the experience of this seminal pulse and what it continues to represent for these communities: the affirmation of a culture that is still alive despite the genocide, a revolutionary and spiritual heart that continues to beat against the tide of the West.

Beyond this encounter, there is the question of displacement, geographical, cultural, artistic and personal, to perhaps also question our own foundations, boundaries and avant-gardes. This question is articulated around a recurring motif: the pulse and its repetition.

An endeavour to reveal how this beating of the heart, of bodies, and of the world is also our own.

And then there’s a people who never took more from nature than it could provide and who continue to defend these values today in Trump’s America, a people who one day imagined defeating entire cavalries of heavily-armed soldiers by dancing day and night - that speaks to me and it should speak to us all.

Who are the new Indians?

Olivia Grandville

Trained first in ballet, Olivia Grandville resigned from the Paris Opéra Ballet to join the Compagnie Bagouet in 1988. For more than twenty years she has developed her own work, most focusing on the question of language and phrasing, be it musical, verbal or choreographic.

In 2010, she created Une semaine d’art en Avignon (A week of Art in Avignon) with Léone Nogarède and Catherine Legrand, under the auspices of the Sujets à Vif section of the Avignon Festival, then Le Cabaret discrépant, the result of research carried out on lettrist choreographic scores, created and presented at the 2011 Avignon Festival and then at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris. During the 2013  2014 season, she created a number of solos: L’invité mystère (The mystery guest) based on a text by Grégoire Bouiller; Le Grand Jeu, a solo described as «under the influence»; and Toute ressemblance ou similitude (Any resemblance or similarity) based on a text by Aurore Jacob. She then created a number of larger scale works, notably Foules (Crowds), a creation for 100 amateur dancers, in 2015, prefiguring her next work, Combat de Carnaval (Carnival Combat) and Carême (Lent) for 10 dancers. She has been an Associated Artist at the Lieu unique since 2017, where she created A l’Ouest (In the west) in May 2018, channeling her own study trip to Canada and the USA to research First Nations dances.

Grandville is also a dancer and improvisation specialist and is regularly invited to work on the implementation of projects, notably by the choreographer Boris Charmatz (Roman-Photo, Levée des conflits, 20 danseurs pour le 20èmesiècle) and César Vayssié (Coproud)…

 César Vayssié produces films and performances. At the intersection of visual arts and dance, his work sidesteps all classification. His  artist status is emblematic of a work permanently trying to find  itself, starting from intra and extra cinematographic influences. After graduating from Beaux-Arts (art school), he joined the Académie de France-Villa Medici in Rome as a filmmaker. Alongside UFE(UNFILMÉVÈNEMENT),  he created UFE performance at MuCEM - Actoral 15. During FIAC 2016 in  Paris Vayssié premiered his piece COPROUDUCTION a series of improvised  duets with experienced performers.

Source :  César Vayssié

More information :
https://www.cesarvayssie.com/

Mille Plateaux has been home to artist and choreographer Olivia Grandville's project since January 2022. Mille Plateaux aims to be a space for creation, experimentation and artistic innovation; it wishes to reflect the vitality and diversity of the contemporary scene, and to be a home for choreographic cultures in the broadest sense. The National Choreographic Centres are major players in the vitality and structuring of choreographic creation in France and constitute one of the labels of the French Ministry of Culture.

the play is followed by a screening of the documentary film Traverser les grandes eaux

Directed by: Stéphane Pauvret and Olivia Grandville
Sound materials / Music:Alexis Degrenier
Testimonials of Marie Léger, Malik Kistabish, Marguerite Wylde, Israël Wylde-McDougall, Réjean Boutet, Carl Seguin, Ivanie Aubin
Production: Mille Plateaux, CCN La Rochelle
Co-productions: Le lieu unique, Nantes national scene
With the support of the city of Nantes, of the French Institute and of the French Embassy in Ottawa (CA)