Pierre Doussaint and Isabelle Dobouloz are two of the most important protagonists of the new wave of French dance. They both have various training experiences, but their work has been marked above all by a period of work with the Esquisse, the Excellent company led by Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia. The Doussaint-Dubouloz couple belongs very much, due to stylistic familiarity, to the dimension of the Esquisse: strong, very “physical” energies, a wave of warm emotion in the exasperated movement of the bodies, passion for a “concrete”, dramatic dance, in the rejection of any abstraction. The two works that Doussaint and Dubouloz – who usually work as a couple – present in Rovereto are autonomous creations, signed separately. Angel Strip, Doussant’s solo, was born from a recent frequentation of Japanese culture by the choreographer-dancer. The duo composed by Dobouloz and interpreted by her alongside Nathalie Clouet, is “a female adventure”, according to the author: a very sensual work on the instinctuality of women, which in its genesis was inspired by surrealist painters, by their way of reflecting and interpreting the feminine universe.
Michel Hallet Eghayan presents in Rovereto an extract from his most recent creation, L’ile aux ruisseaux, which debuted in Lyon (the city where the choreographer lives and works) in April of this year. Michel Hallet Eghayan has often been defined as a “post-Cunninghamian”.
His dance as abstract embroidery, “cold” and geometric, rigorously developed in a logic where every movement of the body develops an internal necessity, has been defined by Marcelle Michel, critic of Le Monde “Dance in its pure state”. Finally Instance, the very intense duet interpreted and composed by Catherine Diverrès and Bernardo Montet. These two artists, who both attended Béjart’s Mudra school, and who worked with Blaska, Nourkil, Ambash, Bagouet and Verret, obtained a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture in 1982 to go and study Buto dance in Japan with the great master (and founder of Buto) Kazuo Ohno. From that study and work trip was born Instance, created in Tokyo in 1983, then presented in Paris in the same year, and re-proposed this summer at the Festival d’Avignon. A duet full of mystery, which is explicitly influenced by Kazuo Ohno.
