Dear love
"While visiting a house, a ghostly woman materializes, almost as if the walls perspire a distant memory, where the scent is still fresh from her last appearance.
From the very human condition of an individual searching for himself and others, to the more remote condition of a dancer embodying, more than evoking, the passions of a being, for one single man, there are five bodies writing a letter tainted with everyday love. Finding its roots in absence, the letter is by nature introspective, sometimes troubled, often in search of elevation, and always tender. As expressed in dance, it translates the echoes of everyday events and finishes, like the last page of a diary, in the serenity of calm solitude.”
Michel Kelemenis
Echos
Libération Marie-Christine Vernay
feb.1996
There are 5 dancers who narrowly breakway alone : solos that do not rely on individual or spectacular performances but that read like personal notes scribbled in pencil, during a warm night while waiting for a storm. There are 5 dancers for a disturbing quintet that recalls how the dancer’s body is crisscrossed with currents that are just as masculine as feminine. (…) We’re in a world of writing, thus of fiction, where the intimate hasn’t refused to speak. But it’s a work that revives an idea about dance as a language in and of itself, which can’t be translated, doesn’t depict anything but itself, and has its own grammar, spelling and syntax.
Especially when it is conveyed, and this is the case, by performers who know how to use the vocabulary, whether it is classical or nourished by personal invention.
Saisons de la danse Philippe Verrièle
apr.1996
This latest creation by Kelemenis is received like a letter, like a fragment, and assembles all the elements that constitute life. The quintet of men, with their dream-like frailty, their childish processions, where each dancer, clenching his fists in front of his face, hops forward like an apprentice-dancer, is clearly situated in the register of sexual ambiguity, starting with the title and its nuanced spelling. The correspondence, whose reading sets the rhythm for the piece, deliberately maintains ambiguity ; it is impossible to know with certainty whether the speaker is male or female. The choreographer even delights in misleading the viewer : the photos on rolling panels that frame the space represent a woman, from afar, and even more disturbing is the choreographic vocabulary that is itself ambiguous. Rich and purposely sophisticated, often virtuosic, the dance is refined in its large movements, often slowed down to an extreme, and undergoes strong accelerations ; it is burlesque, theatrical and almost naturalist. In its very structure, it perfectly translates the impossibility of certainties.