Sors

As part of the Danses et Continents Noirs Festival (2013), Belgian dancer Pedro Pauwels performs his solo piece Sors.

For this creation, Pedro Pauwels revisits Mary Wigman’s La Danse de la sorcière (1914) and asks several choreographers to write him a solo based on this legendary dance.

“I turned to artists who are very different from me. Artists who have the ability to destabilize me to the maximum. The rules of the game were the same: to write me a solo lasting ten to fourteen minutes, based on Mary Wigman’s Dance of the Witch, but also dealing with the figure of the sorcerer and the witch. Jérôme Thomas made me a very magical, cheerful proposal based on a plastic material that evolves over time. With Josef Nadj, who worked on the universality of the witch in a very poetic and graphic way, I wear a seven-kilo bell on my head! Robyn Orlin has me dancing with an electric toothbrush: this is a reference to the context in which Mary Wigman lived, when Jews were made to clean anti-Nazi slogans with toothbrushes. In Carlotta Ikeda’s work, I wear a kimono, but not in the usual way: it is also a second skin from which I try to extricate myself. Getting out of oneself, bringing out what is inside oneself: it is a questioning of these forces and what they represent in different cultures.”

Pedro Pauwels – Interview by Nathalie Yokel

Source: La Terrasse, n°207, March 1st, 2013