"When the birds reveal their secrets"
In the "Conference of the Birds" (Mantiq al-Tayr) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abú Talib Muhàmmad ben Ibrahim Attar, there is a fascinating story (as recounted by the learned Borges in "Fictions") that we wish to recall on the occasion of "La Confidence des Oiseaux", a truly extraordinary event – an outdoor dance involving birds – opening the 2006 edition of Oriente Occidente. The remote king of the birds, Simurgh, drops a magnificent feather in the center of China. Tired of their ancient anarchy, the birds decide to embark on its search. They know that the name of their king means thirty birds, and they know that his palace is in Kaf, the circular mountain that encircles the earth. They launch into the almost endless adventure, overcoming seven valleys or seas. The name of the penultimate is Vertigo, the last is called Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert, others perish. Thirty birds, purified by the harsh trials, reach the mountain of Simurgh. They finally contemplate it: they realize that they themselves are the Simurgh, and that Simurgh is each of them.
Who knows if the Breton Luc Petton, creator of this unique project featuring four dancers, two bird handlers, several musicians, and a group of choral dancers formed under the auspices of the International Dance Center of Rovereto, knows this magnificent poem about the principle of identity. Perhaps so: thirty birds – including storks, crows, parrots, and ducks – are lending him their confidence. Certainly, the approach to these "winged" spirits, guardians of the beauty of nature, is paradoxically anti-naturalistic: it's not about dancing "like birds" or copying their movements – although in the overall event in Val di Sella, some dancers and musicians simulate the flight and movement of birds "in a journey without beginning or end" – but rather about waiting for them to approach and participate in human dances in a reversal of time – no longer dictated by humans – which is itself an act of absolute respect towards one of the planet's most underappreciated geniuses.
Luc Petton, founder in 1994 of the company "Le Guetteur" (the sentinel or the watcher), but still connected to the group "Icosaèdre" of which he was co-director with Marilén Iglesias-Breuker, says he began working on "La Confidence des Oiseaux" as early as 2004. This was a year before the debut at Oriente Occidente 2005 of "Oscar", dedicated to Schlemmer and in particular to the "Dance of the Rods" by the famous Bauhaus artist. While "Oscar" was a formal spectacle where one could already glimpse extensions and prostheses (rods, sticks, long poles) applied to the costumes of six dancers, referencing the animal world: insects, snakes, butterflies, and peacocks, as well as martial arts combat and gymnastic performances. Now the artist, trained in New York with Alwin Nikolais and in Essen with Susanne Linke, has abandoned all cultural moorings to boldly venture into the search for Simurgh with thirty birds "not trained or forced to learn movements" but long considered his "cohabitants", for a Confidence that certainly relates to the need for a return to nature in the vilified technological age of pollution, but perhaps even more to that paradisiacal extension of the principle of identity philosophically passing from the "Conference of the Birds" to Plotinus' "Enneads", when he says: "All things in the intelligible heaven are everywhere. Everything is all things. The sun is all stars, and every star is all stars and the sun."
