CND – Centre nationale de la danse
CPR – Center for Performance Research
Draf – David Roberts Art Foundation
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporaine
Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
Mercat de les flors – DanceHouse
MOCA – The Museum of Contemporary Art
Dec 2022 /Jan 2023
INFINI by Boris Charmatz at Festival d’Automne à Paris
After his preceding work 10000 gestes, Boris Charmatz continues to dig deeper and deeper into the organic and conflictual relationship between the finite nature of the body and the multiplication of numbers, or between physics and algebra. This time around, however, he uses infinity as the starting point for his investigations. Both philosophical and mathematical object, pure abstraction and pillar of reality, infinity is by its …
ESCAPE ACT by Alexandra Bachzetsis at HAU
In the age of mass-produced visual media and steadfast obsession with preserving the youthful body, it is almost impossible to distinguish between appearance and existence. In Escape Act Alexandra Bachzetsis turns her attention with subtle irony to the construction of authenticity and investigates its manifestations in everyday and pop culture. Her Choreography quotes voguing, youtube-tutorials, as well as the language of form of the “Triadic Ballet” …
PARADISO by Richard Maxwell at Greene Naftali
With Paradiso, Richard Maxwell completes his triptych inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The play takes place in the not-too-distant future, describing three great loves: family, country, and god. In an empty space, a car moves forward and the show begins. A robot launches himself into a monotone and futuristic dithyramb while some individuals, slowly, extricate themselves from the vehicle. “By the way, welcome to the show,” says the robot, “because the best part of a play is that it’s where we meet.” A place that allows us to share ideas that otherwise they would only float in the space. Three monologues follow the improbable prologue of the robot, three stories, one of which evokes the death of the director’s mother, beginning as a philosophical abstraction and then reflecting in a very singular narrative the last days of a woman’s life, told by his son in a domestic landscape that is transformed by the absence of the one who once lived there. Performing human sculpture-like pantomimed vignettes, the performers reveal Maxwell’s idea of paradise as a space larger and more vast than life. In his trademark economical way, the leading figure of American experimental theater asks the question, simply but vigorously: what remains when all the efforts were given, when everything was built and the fights are over? What is the life that goes on when human life is finished?
