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Democracy
What could be more liberating and restrictive for the body than being confronted with a rhythm? Surrendering to it, slipping into it, submitting to it, breaking free from it, finding one’s place within it, transforming it from within…
It is at the heart of this paradox that Maud Le Pladec has placed the driving force behind her creation—like a choreographic machine from which subjective and political questions escape. Continuing her research into contemporary music, she drew on Miguel Abensour’s La démocratie contre l’état (Democracy Against the State) as a source of indeterminacy and excess, transforming it into a reflection on ways of being together. Unfolding the theatrical implications of her question, she then connected this thought in action to the disruptive force of Julia Wolfe’s piece Dark Full Ride: an unbridled cavalcade of toms, cymbals, and bass drums, combining the power of rock with the principles of repetition and minute variations of post-minimalist music. Extended by the score composed in echo by Francesco Filidei and performed on stage by the TaCTuS ensemble, the music forms a foundation and a setting: a living fabric that envelops the dancers or expels them, encircles them, intensifies them; a device that they derail, whose mechanisms they appropriate and disrupt.
Subjected to this pressure of skin and muscles, blows and footsteps, the stage becomes a surface of exchange where figures transit and unfold, like so many allegories of political invention: collective escapes in conflictual situations, singular incarnations in accidental encounters, networks of meaning and references intertwine, revealing the idea of an insurgent democracy, a vehicle for utopia. Between chaos and balance of forces, scrupulous partition and vital overflow, Democracy offers a dance charged with states, ideas, and rhythms, and becomes the support for a polemical community where dancers and drummers work to undo established places. Alternately isolated, festive, busy, multiplied, driven, scattered, united, their bodies carry the seeds of a wild democracy.
Gilles Amalvi
