April 2024

Marie Byrd, Résidence de création 2025 avec le CDN de Poitiers

Du 15 au 20 avril , résidence à la Baraka, CDN de Poitiers-Nouvelle Aquitaine à Poitiers

Trainings Ex Nihilo

du 22 au 26 avril au studio de la Cité des arts de la rue à Marseille

May 2024

Trainings Ex Nihilo

Du 13 au 17 mai au studio de la Cité des arts de la rue et en extérieur à Marseille

July 2024

Un sentier en Normandie#5

Les 27 et 28 juillet à Saint-Etienne-sous-Bailleul (27)

August 2024

Assemblements

Le 3 août au festival Le petit phénomène à Camplong (34)

all our shows

THEY ARE NO LONGER PLAYED…

Salida

Created in 2001 | Piece for 6 dancers and 2 musicians | indoor or outdoor | 50 minutes

An evening at a ball, with only a string of lights, a few chairs and an electric guitar and a drum set leading the dance. The audience of this spontaneous party forms a circle around the dancers…

The atmosphere of the balls, when, at the end of the night, alcohol and fatigue drive people to abandon themselves and release their inhibitions, when wounds appear, deep ruptures that mark bodies, faces and the relationship with the other… We touch each other, we stick to each other, we cling to each other with no restraint, with no embarrassment. Bar atmosphere in Northern France or Europe, with photos by Anders Peterson.

Regarding the dance: the tango, the milongas, the knitting of the legs of an Argentinean couple’s dance, the tense, restrained body to body. The tango as an inspiration, we did not want to learn it by the rules but rather to reinvent the games played in couples. We went towards the whirlwind, the whirling, the desperate embrace. Men and women play to seduce each other, to love each other without ever being fooled, leaving each other and finding each other again. The ball is its music, and here it is played live. The two musicians lead the dancers as much as they accompany them.

Choreography Anne Le Batard and Jean-Antoine Bigot

Dancers J.-A. Bigot, A. Le Batard/Corinne Pontana, Anne Reymann, Jean-Marc Fillet, Virginie Coudoulet-Girard

Music Pascal Ferrari, Yves Miara (live)

Lighting design Jean-Louis Floro

Coproductions La Compagnie, atelier d’artistes à Belsunce / La Officina, atelier marseillais de production and Lieux Publics, centre national des arts de la rue, Marseille

Created for the Dansem festival, Marseille, and performed since then at Dies de Dansa, Barcelona; Batofar, Paris; Atelier 231, Sotteville-lès-Rouen; L’Arsenal, Metz; Furies, Châlons-en-Champagne; Chalon dans la Rue (Off); Sabadell, Spain; Rencontres chorégraphiques, Istres; Les 400 clous, Lille; Caressez le potager, Marseille…

Passants

Piece/installation for 5 dancers including 1 musician | indoor | 1h 15min

The performance space is shared between the spectators, the 5 dancers, the musician and the technicians. The floor is entirely covered with cardboard boxes, light bulbs hanging from the ceiling diffuse a subdued light, radios pour out their daily news, mirrors here and there evoke an intimate space, clothes hanging on the wall seem to be exposed for sale. The dancers, isolated passers-by, will gradually cross paths and look at each other without distrust, curiosity, or indifference. It’s natural to be in this place that’s neither quite inside nor quite outside.

Video images and super 8 films projected on the wall or on cardboard walls and sound recordings bear witness to improvisations and encounters made by the dancers over several months in the streets of Belsunce, Marseille, or Havana. Attentive to the sound and visual atmosphere, the spectators will let themselves be taken away – or stopped – by the dancers who insinuate themselves between them, approaching until they touch them, moving away, incongruous, unusual, and disconcerting. Nothing is imposed, the spectator chooses his place, his point of view, his perspective.

Choreography Anne Le Batard, Jean-Antoine Bigot

Dancers A. Le Batard, J.-A. Bigot, Anne Reymann, Lisa Da Boit

Live music Patrice de Benedetti

Words Abdelkader Benazzouzi, Ahmed Chaïb, Idal et Christoph Schütz

Lights Christophe Bruyas et Delphine Bonnefoi

Images Laurence Rebouillon, A. Le Batard

Scenography and costumes Ex Nihilo

Coproductions CCN de Rillieux-La-Pape, Cie Maguy Marin as part of Accueil Studio 2004; l’Atelier 231, Centre National de production des Arts de la Rue de Sotteville-lès-Rouen; La Compagnie, Marseille and Le Fourneau, fabrique des arts de la rue de Bretagne.

With the support of La Compagnie and Dansem

Created at 3bisF, a contemporary art venue in Aix-en-Provence in 2004

Played at Festival des Antipodes, Brest; La Minoterie, Marseille; Espace Albert Camus, Bron; Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht, Netherlands; Studio Kéléménis, Marseille; Festival ISTF, Gand, Belgium; Mes de Danza, Sevilla, Spain; Atelier 231, Sotteville-lès-Rouen; Danse en Avril, Aubagne; Densité, l’Athanor SN, Albi…

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The Passants Project

“Belsunce is not the subject of your project but the place where you danced, the place that you revealed, framed by your dance. Belsunce becomes the theatre of the everyday gestures not only through dance but also through your anonymous presence, readable in the walk of the passers-by as an unconscious dance, as a dance that doesn’t know itself to be a dance, spontaneous, free, a dance of all the people, a dance of the crutches, of the children, of the women, of the young people, of the glances and the bodies multiplied in a district where the street is enlivened by an energy that we don’t find in other districts.

Paul-Emmanuel Odin, artist and member of the collective La Compagnie.

We lived a 6-month journey in the Belsunce district of Marseille, our city, hosted by an artists’ studio dedicated to contemporary art: La Compagnie. During this period, we performed daily, dancing in the streets, with different schedules, from early morning to nightfall. It was not our desire to invite a large audience or to propose a spectacular form, we wanted to “find ourselves” among the passers-by, in their rhythm, the rhythm of the neighborhood. A discreet but watchful camera was the privileged witness of these moments. These dance meetings – there were about fifty of them – were advertised the same day on the door of la Compagnie and indicated on a map of the neighbourhood. As for the week’s programme, people would have to ask by email to get the places and times of the performances, but also the training times (open trainings took place in the morning), the next video sessions, the proposals of other artists that we invited, a programme held during the 6 months of this research.

In order to tell the story, to show it to as many people as possible, and to restore the dance materials found in the streets of Belsunce, we also proposed 3 dance meetings to la Compagnie itself. We tried to propose a different experience for each one of them, trying to bring into play the same performance space and what we were doing there. These meetings, lasting 3 or 4 hours, were settings of dances, video and super 8 projections, sounds, recorded and noted words, reactions of passers-by or long conversations… the traces of our presence in the outdoors.

This residency at la Compagnie allowed us to reexamine our dance, as well as our relationship to public spaces and “protected” spaces of representation: the street or the theatre, as two places of art, very simply. Dancing and searching, for one and for the other, a desire to continue tracing paths that go from one to the other… The experience continued in the streets of Regla, in Havana, in Beirut, and in Warsaw, in the Praga district.

The work process of Belsunce led us to two performances, exploring the same themes, but with a different presentation and relationship to the audience: a short outdoor piece created in Havana for the Urban Dance Festival, Calle Obrapia #4, performed in a busy street again, and an indoor installation piece, Passants, in which the audience is “integrated” into the performance space, with video and film projections, soundtrack and live music.

Passants bears witness to long periods of dancing in the streets, to encounters, to the stories of men and women. We have affirmed a concrete, carnal, physical, committed dance, in exact opposition to the aseptization of bodies and daily social interactions. Passants was created during a residency at 3bisf, a contemporary art space housed in the psychiatric hospital in Aix-en-Provence, an atypical place where creation is always in contact with patients.

Jean-Antoine Bigot

Quarantaine

Piece for 5 dancers and 2 musicians | outdoor | 50 minutes

Commissioned by the festival Les Nuits Caroline for the site of the Caroline Hospital, on the Frioul Islands in Marseille. Its location evokes Ellis Island, that small island in front of Manhattan where immigrants from all over the world were landed, dreaming of a better world. They were sorted, separated, rejected, treated, or accepted. The Caroline Hospital had a sanitary vocation, it was a quarantine place to preserve the city from possible epidemics. These two places, lived space and imaginary space, resonate with our present. Facing the city, so close, so far…

Choreography Anne Le Batard and Jean-Antoine Bigot

Dancers Jean-Marc Fillet, J.-A. Bigot, Anne Le Batard/Anne Reymann, Anne Foucher, Marianne Houspie

Music Yves Miara and Patrice De Benedetti

Images Laurence Rebouillon

Lights Delphine Bonnefoi

Stage manager Sylvain Ricard

Cité des Arts de la Rue
225 Avenue Ibrahim Ali / Aygalades
13015 Marseille

+33 (0)4 91 42 02 87
compagnie@exnihilodanse.com

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April 2024

Marie Byrd, Résidence de création 2025 avec le CDN de Poitiers

Trainings Ex Nihilo

May 2024

Trainings Ex Nihilo

July 2024

Un sentier en Normandie#5

August 2024

Assemblements

THEY ARE NO LONGER PLAYED…

Salida

Passants

Quarantaine

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