here, then

  • Premiered on 26 November 2015 at Le Vivat, Armentières (FR) during Next Festival.
  • Choreography Rémy Héritier
    Text Marcelline Delbecq
    Performance Nuno Bizarro, Madeleine Fournier, Rémy Héritier, Sandra Iché
    Music Sébastien Roux
    Light Ludovic Rivière
  • Production GBOD!
  • Coproductions Musée de la danse (Rennes) ; Le Vivat, scène conventionnée danse et théâtre (Armentières) ; Le Phénix, scène nationale (Valenciennes) ; Le Centre National de la Danse (Pantin) ; Le CDC Toulouse / Midi-Pyrénées ; Le Ballet du Nord, CCN de Roubaix Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
  • Residencies Iaspis, (Stockholm) ; Mount Analogue (Stockholm) ; Ballet du Nord (Roubaix) ; Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers ; CND (Pantin) ; CDC Toulouse / Midi-Pyrénées ; Scène nationale d’Orléans ; Le Vivat (Armentières) ; Buda Kunstencentrum (Kortrijk) ; Musée de la danse (Rennes).
  • Grants and support IASPIS (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Program), FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques), bourse d’aide à l’écriture Beaumarchais-SACD, Culture o centre, Conseil régional de Nord Pas-de-Calais, DICRéAM – CNC, SPEDIDAM, ADAMI.
  • GBOD! / Rémy Héritier is supported by DRAC Nord Pas-de-Calais au titre de l’aide à la compagnie

Here, then is a new project that unites the practices of choreographer Rémy Héritier and visual artist Marcelline Delbecq. This two-voiced project, born from the desire to cross two modes of thinking and two practices that are almost antagonistic, is composed of a choreographic piece structured around an installation of a camera obscura.
The set of the choreographic piece and the presence of text immerse spectators in a space/time divided between reality and its live projection.

The set and its influence on the choreographic score

The choreographic score is the combination of two ways of producing and looking at dance while considering the camera obscura as a point of junction between dance and visual arts.

The camera obscura is a multi-millenial optical principle. The painters of the Renaissance used it as a tool for transposition when projecting an image onto the canvas. One can envisage the camera obscura cas a principle of reality cinema when the image is not fixed on any type of a support.
What one sees, upside-down and reversed, is a present analogically projected on a surface that captures light. Performative images are first inscribed on the retina and then, according to principles that involve the entire body, inscribed on both the dancer and the spectator’s memory.

The archaeology of image encounters the ontology of the performance.

The text

The narrative, constructed from the set of the camera obscura, nourished by the same corpus of documents and by observing the dancers during rehearsals, questions the ontology of the image in its relationship to reality, captured in the temporality of its own flow. Its movement is never interrupted, like an outdstanding incarnation of the definition of reality (… everything which, when one no longer believes in it, continues to exist). As long as it is only visible through the specific set on stage, its course ceases to exist when the eye is no longer looking at it. Inexhaustible, impossible to fix, both tangible and evanescent, this image metaphorically recalls the dance itself, whose existence is suspended on the instant of its representation.

The text unveils a story of movement in relation to the still image, the moving image and to projection, either mental or visible.
When broadcast, the text embodies a presence foreign to the dancers’. The voice gives shape to the invisible narrative and enables spectators to project themselves both here and then. The text becomes an audio experience in a visual context.
The text is also given out as a booklet at the end of the performance, allowing viewers to read it afterwards and be immersed into another type of visual experience.

Alternately heard or read, the text create its own echo within the choreographic piece.

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