“No-one can get away from fashion advertising,” says Laure Bonicel, and it has a firm grip. The poses of the body themselves are shaped by the ambient mythologies and images which permanently surround us. This modelling of the body and posture is all the more powerful because it is subliminal. Hence the importance of investigating its workings and effects, and possibly disarming them. Alongside the company's five dancers, Laure Bonicel trained ten amateurs for the performance of her project at the Centre National de la Danse. They worked intensively together within the composition rules laid down by the choreographer, assisted by Christine Bombal. Advertising photographs, linked by other images belonging to other equally-codified worlds, or with just as many connotations, served as a thematic springboard. But the preparatory work concentrated essentially on acquiring a quality of presence and mutual listening,

Some parts of the choreography are written down, but most of the sequences are reinvented with each performance as an “instant composition”. The work upstream was nevertheless so coherent that the choreography appears to flow naturally, as if a shared pulse animates the movements of the performers in the space.
Groups form, take up a pose and melt away, creating a whole lot of images and attitudes which seem to emanate from a collective cultural melting pot. And yet singularities eventually emerge.  For in probing this shared material from which our gestures are woven, finally, it is the ceaseless working on difference that wins the day.

Annie Suquet

Digital resource - Médiathèque du Centre national de la danse
http://mediatheque.cnd.fr/spip.php?page=mediatheque-numerique-ressource&id=PHO00003974

Updating: March 2010

After training at the CNDC, Angers and performing from 1989 to 1998 with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Odile Duboc and Mark Tompkins, Laure Bonicel began her own choreographic research in 1992 and founded the Moleskine company in 1993.

Her work is perfused by the question of identity, tackled by means of the image, the game of constructing the being from accumulated fragments.
Her work on the body-subject / body-object induces a systematic rapport between the body and stage make-up, clothing, props, cross-dressing and transformation.

Early on, Laure Bonicel developed her artistic approach by using means and resolutions that were as sculptural as they were choreographic. She honed this method through topical pieces which deploy a performance language close to that of sculptural installation. The dancers' bodies are choreographed as if they were moving sculptures. To achieve this, Laure Bonicel employs graphic techniques and regularly uses a process of stretched time to allow the passage from form to formless.

Laure Bonicel is also concerned with how her approach is communicated to the audience. This led her to offer to compose, in partnership with host organisations, a programme specific to each one, presenting several pieces spread over the year and in different performance spaces. These programmes are associated with encounters and practical workshops relating to the creative work, which she leads with the company's artistic collaborators.

Source : Moleskine website

Updating: March 2010

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.).