Loin de là was created on the isle of Terschelling off the coast of Holland* and placed at slack water, that brief moment when the tide is stationary, time in suspension, a breath, at that moment between the tide coming in and going out. The site of the representation is infinite, as far as one can see. The dancers are tiny people lost in the immensity of space. As if coming from nowhere, they tell a story of the wind, to the sound of an accordion, the horizon, the wait for the return from sea, treasures brought up by the tide. Created on an isle, Loin de là can also be shown in town, in a car park or a public space.

Street or beach: the largest setting possible: the earth.
No costumes but clothing: ordinary people.
They arrive: some from the depth of the horizon.
Climbing onto an oil drum the better to see into the distance – or to embrace the air more easily.
Bodies knotted one to the other at a distance.
Naked and empty space peopled with absence, except for these few details, a few chairs left as signs of some previous presence, of the beginning of a human community.
Town or nature, one not only runs, or turns, or gesticulates, or jumps on this same earth, but on the same horizon where bodies appear so small as to disappear into infinity.
A human festival, a person to person of that which is always the first and the last, friendship and love, whose feelings little by little disturb in a soundless banter, a few couples search and tease each other to the background music of an accordion.
Then, as if a tide of sound had imperceptibly covered all the land right up to us, we are submerged by the physical proximity of those who have advanced so closely: all their movements are of falling, horizontal momentum, rubbing, rolling in the sand or on the tarmac.
If these bodies had never been so close to the ground, they have become, in someway, tears and flames – a red dress in the wind.

Paul-Emmanuel Odin

* Loin de là came from an Amalgame and was created for the Oerol Festival, Terschelling.