Martine Pisani: HORS SUJET OU LE BEL ICI

THE LAUGHTER TRAP

The choreographer Martine Pisani toured at the Mladi levi festival back in 2002 with her perfor-mance Sans. With an amalgam of gestures from everyday life and movement “slips”, she managed to keep the full attention of the audience for almost an hour, for the whole length of the performance. Martine and her crew felt that the connection with the audience was incredible. The performance Hors sujet ou le bel ici evokes laughter: not only with the act of motion but also with the relationship between movements and meanings, which are ascribed to them and which appear in scenes as announcements, translations or subtitles of situations. Motions are only half finished and their incompleteness creates ceaseless tension and expectation. Audiences used to searching for the meaning between the lines feel like fish out of water, when the scene with people, wan-dering with their arms stretched in front of them as if they were blind, is accompanied by the word “fog”. One critic wrote about the performance: “Language as a signpost to nothingness.”

Concept: Martine Pisani
Performers: Christophe Ives, Théo Kooijman, Eduard Mont de PalolV
Visual collaborator: André Guedes
Lighting design: Olivier Schwal, Ludovic Rivière
Texts: Paul Claudel, Daniil Harms, Christophe Ives, Jack Kerouac, Théo Kooijman, Stéphane Mallarmé, Eduard Mont de Palol, Martine Pisani, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Shakespeare
Administration and booking: Lien Juttet
Production: La compagnie du solitaire
Coproduction: Centre National de la Danse Paris, Joyce SoHo with the support of the program Fused New York, fabrik Potsdam
Thanks to: David Gordon, Nathalie Lithwick, Martin Nachbar, Michèle Paldacci
Residencies: CCN de Montpellier in the framework of Hors séries, Festival Istanbul ReConnect, Centre National de la Danse à Pantin, Théâtre Sévelin 36-Cargo 103 Lausanne

55 minutes

The performance is in English.