"I take on the task of exploring the contours and frescoes of romantic passion, of what is inscribed first and foremost in a bodily relationship with the other. The red and the black, vitality and destruction, strength and pain..."
With these words, Catherine Berbessou—a contemporary dancer and French choreographer dedicated since 2003 to teaching and practicing Argentine tango with Federico Rodriguez Moreno—presents her latest creation: Tu, el cielo y tu, named after a magnificent tango by Carlos Di Sarli. This performance, born in the spring of 2017 after a period of creative abstinence, sees Berbessou exploring her passion for Argentine dance while continuing a compositional dialogue initiated back in 1996 with A Fuego lento, and carried on with Valser (1999), a successful work recreated in 2014 for the Ballet du Capitole in Toulouse. In these works, as in her latest, she reinterprets the vocabulary of tango through a blend with contemporary dance to make visible the fabric of romantic feelings that underpin our everyday lives.
Always dedicated to an expressionist dance—having studied under masters like Joëlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia—Berbessou has explored the theme of couple dynamics, masculinity, and femininity in many of her performances. In Tu, el cielo y tu, she brings to the stage five couples made up of contemporary dancers and tango dancers. The challenge? To find new richness in the mélange of techniques, styles, and bodies. To work on the idea of the heart in all its shades: the organ that determines our existence, as its beating is a source of life or death; the keeper of feelings, of love, whether a builder or a destroyer.
And it is the bodies of the dancers that narrate the entire spectrum of possible emotions within the couple, bearing traces of moments of ecstasy and surrender, resonating with the heart and the bandoneon.
