Catch Taxidermie tonight and tomorrow
TAXIDERMIE
Contemporary dance
Tuesday the 24th and Wednesday the 25th of October 2006.
At Wits Theatre, 8pm
Price R70.00, students R10.00 on presentation of student card.
Limited seats available.
The creation of ý Taxidermie ý in Maputo is the third step of a project of French contemporary dance company Projet in situ involving four cities: Mexico city, Montrýal, Maputo and M…
arseilles (the 4 M). How does a city allow us to live, think and create? The 4 M project starts with this simple question. 4 M as in Mexico, Montreal, Maputo and Marseille: the four cities where Projet In Situ has carried out research (choreographic, visual, anthropologic) on the intimate, urban existence of local artists. Intimacy of the city, human messiness, recycling of gestures, trajectories of nervous systems, dead ends to change &.To set out on a journey to meet a city, to encounter its infinite quantity of gestures. The first stopover was in Mexico City in 2002, then Montreal in 2005,a third stopover in Maputo in 2006.
In the city, in this public space par excellence, the everyday intimacies of each individual and the collective body rub against each together. This physical duality is at the heart of our choreographic research. How to perceive and forget an environment that is influencing our perceptions? If one is convinced that the senses have their own vast memory that allows for the re-emergence of memories, of emotions, of early gestures then a question emerges of ‘how to rediscover ones’ own ‘seeing’?’ To see what remains when you forget to look, what we might invent without a mirror, seeing without looking, touching without actually touching. Here we envisage the body circulating within city in its various states within its everyday journeys. The urban space is understood as a collection of personal routes to be taken to keep the city circulating, designing corridors of movement, one way streets, and bodies creating obstacles to their own momentum forwards.
In the city of Maputo, French, Mozambican, Zimbabwean and South-African artists have been searching for traces of memory, forms of forgetfulness, revealing bodies impregnated with those urban, intimate and collective memory.
In Maputo the city failures became like excavation sites. By confronting oneself to these spaces, one could design the structures; feel the shapes, the surfaces of spaces, buildings, sounds and bodies. A radicality, a physicality, an intimacy close to one could have with one’s skeleton has aroused out of those elements placed side by side, their reflects playing one with another.
Choreography: Martin Chaput, Martial Chazallon
Assisted by: Panaibra Gabriel
Dancers: Domingos Biý, Panaibra Gabriel, Janete Mulapha
Scenography: Berry Bickle
Music: Dimitri Voudouris
Light: Cyril Givort
Co production: Projet in situ, Afrique en crýation CULTURESFRANCE the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the French and Mozambican Cultural Centre CCFM, the Cooperation and Cultural Action Office of the Embassy of France in Mozambique, the French Institute of South Africa, the Cooperation and Cultural Action Office of the Embassy of France in South Africa, Culturarte, Merlan Theatre scýne nationale ý Marseille.
This project was also supported by the National Choreographic Centre of Maguy Marin Rillieux-la-Pape and was offered a residency at CCFM and Scala Theatre Promarte.
www.projet-insitu.com
PROJET IN SITU
The Company Projet In Situ started in 1999 out of a desire to look at oneself, the other selves and the other,: a process of questioning through meeting different artistic disciplines. We are interested in creative projects for choreographers, anthropologists, dancers, actors, writers, photographers, visual artists and makers that enables them to gather around different locations, people, audiences. Such is our manner to invest the creative process; as opportunities to interweave the work of different types of artist, with their ways of seeing.
Each journey through France, South Africa, Syria, Mexico or Canada has necessitated a new group of artists and acts as a meeting place for differing artistic languages. By exploring the playful, the imaginative, the everyday, the intimate, these groups confront, question, scratch away at the intimate in a life. By tapping into individual and collective aspirations and vulnerabilities we make work that is at the boundary of contemporary dance and theatre.
MARTIN CHAPUT choreographer
Founder member of the collective of artists Projet in situ whose triptych of work included a sole No More King, a duo Wake Up! You must sweep the courtyard! and trio Manege – all projects were led by multidisciplinarity and experimentation with site specificity. A direction to the work started to emerge that was concerned with the intimate and sensorial. From 2002 with the project 4M he has been deepening his choreographic research into the intimate life of performers in relation to the urban with Miradas Cruzadas, and Appartement Temoin. In parallel as a performer he has collaborated with Claire Jenny, Thierry and Marion Bae, Jean- Pierre Perreault, Luc Perrot, and Philippe Genty, with whom he worked with for over four years.
MARTIAL CHAZALLON anthropologist, director
After several years of research in Zimbabwe and South Africa his work led to research with Ndebele painters. It was by inviting other artists into his research to develop view points, he joined Projet In Situ for the creation of Wake Up! You must sweep the courtyard! This marked the start o of creative process where he collaborated on the direction of several pieces in South Africa, Syria and Mexico. He has worked on Miradas Cruzadas and Appartement Týmoin where he has initiated an anthropological exploration of the urban and it relation to the performer
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