Space Dealer

by GERARD MAYEN on Percée Persée – mouvement.net – 19 February 2014

In Percée Persée, Rémy Héritier demolishes a well installed representation of space that consists in imagining it in the form of a stable volume.
During the rather long minutes at the beginning of Percée Persée, the stage remains void of human presence. Does that mean we’re looking at empty space? No. This space is methodically inhabited, pierced by diverse, successive showers of light. Space that is sliced and cut through with expectation, as the spectator/referent irrepressibly calls for action as soon as a circle of light is revealed beneath his/her eyes.
Spectators are then at liberty to appreciate this already trembling space offered to them as landscape. Its outline becomes apparent, surrounded by curtains on the sides and back of the stage, but installed slantwise; one is cut halfway up, enabling us to envisage the passage behind them. These variations on conventional curtain hanging produce a mental appeal, switching to a potential dramatization of the architecture of space. Finally, a speaker is in full view on the stage, as yet silent, teasing the viewer.
Everything is still extremely sober, clear and carefully designed, but already operating thousands of links of attention and suggestion with the audience. Percée Persée has already begun, like a poem of differed articulations of presence, conjugating the powers of sound, volume and human incarnation.
Rémy Héritier then comes forward. As sober as the rest. A paradox endlessly animates his dance: his gestures seem careful, dry and void of pomposity and ornamentation, and yet he seems to be patiently developing them in patterns of abundance. His strength is inside-out, like an etching.
From step to step, between verticality and horizontality, this dancer digs into the space he creates with his body, always aware of the measurements, bringing the bended segments of members back gravely to himself, upward legs towards his chin, with flexions of the torso, or laterally folded, in a studious energy of the trace, geographically rooted in the crossed patterns on the floor, almost like rose windows, barely excited by a few suddenly more acute accents.
Something is suspended, but also accumulated, in this assured composition. Motif after motif, revival after revival, recurrence after recurrence of the dancer who disappears from our view to run along the sides and the back of the stage. Little by little we think we recognize a gesture or a certain coordination. Memory is at play in the instant of the act, with an effect of retinal persistence.
This dancer sculpts the mass of space, digging out slices and sections, while sharing a whole world of glances, like a frozen trance served by a Dervish Turner spinning in a square, almost at a standstill. Becoming an obsession. Entire space vibrates in this exchange of expectation, absence and supposition.
But we almost forgot an essential actor. Percée Persée is, humanly speaking, a duo : the condensation and fluctuation of this matter of space,  moulded by the sounds injected into it, following guitarist Eric Yvelin’s principles.