A close encounter with unusual places and other cultures. This is how the work of Sophie Tabakov, a French dancer of Bulgarian origin and founder of the Anou Skan company in Lyon with Laurent Soubise, presents itself. Always attracted to ritual dances and traditional songs, her life and art are an example of migrations and contacts with other peoples: first the Indian dances of the Pacific coast of the United States, then the Sioux culture she encountered in Alaska, from which, in collaboration with the tribal chief, the work Day Woman was born. Later in Europe, she revived traditional Bulgarian songs for the solo Pat (1995), studied Slavic and Gypsy songs, collaborated with Borys Cholewka for D’instant en instant (1997), and formed the group Ichekala with whom she recorded the album Bleu, voix slave d’Ukraine à Tanger. Equally significant was her meeting with Sister Marie Keyrouz, which led Sophie Tabalov to delve into sacred oriental songs and to dance an interpretation of the Magnificat in the Saint-Jean Cathedral at the Biennale de Lyon's artists' mass in 2000, and her metaphorical encounter with the Nazca Indians of Peru represented in her solo Un Labyrinthe (2002).
With Temps de Feu, her latest creation, which revisits and elaborates the still-living practice in the Balkans and Eastern Europe of gathering around a fire and dancing during seasonal changes on solstice nights, Tabakov continues to explore the conjunction of peoples. Commissioned by the 11th Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2004, Temps de Feu is a piece where Tabakov, together with three other performers, constructs her own imaginary Slavic folklore, rooted in the study of tradition but developed through a happy choreographic fusion with contemporary dance. For the choreographer, moving from contemporary gestures to codified and repetitive movements taken from tradition is like crossing a frontier: a making and unmaking of figures where the collective slides into the personal, where the movement of a crowd flows into a gesture that reveals the specificity and intimacy of an individual. Temps de Feu is structured in three distinct parts that follow the symbolism of the Nestinar ritual; the first, titled Maintenant, consists of four solos that reveal the personalities of the dancers, two women and two men. The choreography develops in perfect symbiosis with Bulgarian Gypsy songs and traditional Hungarian songs. The second part, Je me souviens, presents a sustained, repetitive rhythm, where traditional steps gradually transform into an expressive crescendo to Gypsy brass bands. The third part, Le feu, set to Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 2, sees the dancers transform into an ‘other state,’ into trees with twisting branches. Is it not true that a man without a homeland is like an uprooted tree? To conclude Temps de Feu, the Anou Skan company will organize a dance for peace open to everyone at the Bell of the Fallen: Horo. A dance for peace. In the Balkan countries, horo means 'dance to be performed together,' holding hands. Sophie Tabakov invites the Oriente Occidente audience to learn some very simple basic steps and to dance a horo of peace with her and her company under the moon at a symbolic place like the Rovereto Bell. The bell will toll at 11 PM, signaling the start of this brief but intense collective performance.
