The second phase of choreographer Latifa Laâbissi’s residency focuses on the idea of re-enactment, exploring a corpus of choreography drawn from living art and from history. The opening of this second phase will be the performance of Écran somnanbule (Sleepwalking Screen) and La part du rite (Part Rite) by Latifa Laâbissi.

Écran somnambule
Écran somnambule: a compact block in the middle of a bare space. A face, impassive and grimacing. A motionless sculpture, yet it seems to move, stretch, contract, push its matter to the very limits. By choosing to dance Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance today, in slow motion, Latifa Laâbissi sets before us a mirage, upsetting the status of this “historic” item and covering up tracks left for interpretation. Witch Dance, a major piece in the German expressionist tradition, leaves an incomplete wake that continues to haunt the dance subconscious like a bad dream, a 1’45” film from 1926 showing Mary Wigman almost in a trance, with her legs and arms electric, reacting to the dull rhythm of the percussion. This aesthetic of contrasts, of an abrupt break, where the body transmits contradictory states; how can one restore its potential to disturb without mummifying it? Reproducing only the images from the film, Latifa Laâbissi slips into the body of the witch and fills the stage with a hypnotic state in which every movement reveals its slow construction. At once working material and archive, this discordant silhouette creates a series of disconnects, both in terms of perception and history, leading us to reconsider the connection between dance and its reproduction, its history, its repressed zones. (Gilles Amalvi)
 
Based on film by Mary Wigman tanzt (1930), extract from Witch Dance (Hexentanz, 1926)  //  Conception and interpretation: Latifa Laâbissi  //  Costume conception: Nadia Lauro  //  Lights: Yannick Fouassier  //  Sound creation: Olivier Renouf from instrumental interpretation by H-B Lesguillier (music by H. Hasting and W. Goetze)  //  Technical direction: Ludovic Rivière  //  Length: 32 minutes  //  Production: Figure Project  //  Coproduction: CCN de Franche-Comté à Belfort, La Passerelle, scène nationale de Saint-Brieuc  //  Studio: Musée de la Danse / CCNRB (Rennes), La Ménagerie de Verre


La part du rite
You can just make out a motionless shape under a pile of white towels. A silhouette is busy near it, surrounding it with minutely careful movements. Then you hear a voice, although you can’t be sure where it comes from – a voice that speaks of amateur dance, revolutionary dance, recalling the connection between physical practice, discourse and utopia in Germany in the 1920s. You see two bodies working to create each other, reactivating a paradoxical space-time in which to reconsider dance as an active force. What is the part of the rite in the connection between body and articulated discourse, art and social transformation? This piece, at once a conference, a performance, an installation, examines the connection between flesh and words to reveal the hollow places, the stumbles, residues, futures. In a constant balancing act between manipulation, articulation and de-articulation, a choreographer and a dance theorist seek to attach ideas to states and explore different aesthetic regimes in order to question the world today. Creating a dialectic object together with Écran somnambule, reflecting the paradoxes in the beginnings of modernity and the invention of choreographic art that is simultaneously “magical power and critical strength”, La part du rite, shakes up the archives to awaken ghosts and offer a montage of the present. (Giles Amalvi)

Conception: Latifa Laâbissi  //  Interprétation: Isabelle Launay, Latifa Laâbissi  //  Installation visuelle: Nadia Lauro  //  Durée: 40 minutes  //  Production: Figure Project  //  Coproduction: Centre national de danse contemporaine ANGERS, CCN de Franche-Comté à Belfort, La Passerelle, Scène Nationale de Saint-Brieuc  //  Prêt de studio: Musée de la Danse / CCNRB (Rennes), La Ménagerie de Verre

Free entrance, on reservation:
reservation@leslaboratoires.org and +33 153 561 590

Photo: La part du rite, Latifa Laâbissi, credit Domitille Chaudieu