Queen of a highly personal dance theatre, for over forty years Maguy Marin has been breaking new ground and blazing trails with her productions. From highly formal writing to pure text, from devastating and hypnotic rhythm to Beckett-inspired storytelling, each of her pieces unfolds as an often turbulent, almost always radical universe unto itself.
Maguy Marin's is an emblematic career, beginning with the strikingly novel Nouvelle Danse Française in the 1980s down to the present day, with ever-new lifeblood. She’s back at Oriente Occidente with a historic work never before performed in Italy called Umwelt (which is German for Environment), winner of the Prix Spécial of the jury of Syndicat de la critique in 2006 and a Bessie Award in 2008. Created in 2004, Marin's Umwelt is a world with its own rules, in which a device made of panels and mirrors highlights the lives of the nine performers.
On the stage an exhausting parade of normality and the search for what’s possible aimlessly unfolds. Buoyed and undermined by an inexorable wind, the protagonists carry on for as long as they can, without really searching for any meaning to their actions. They appear and disappear through the gaps between the panels, carry things, repeat actions, come close to meeting but then vanish, witnessing the need for connection that never really leads to contact. A teeming environment spasmodically crossed by people doing often meaningless things. Undoubtedly harking back to Beckett and the theatre of the absurd after her masterpiece May B., already in Rovereto in 1981. In her work on the defeat of a world overwhelmed by consumerism, Maguy Marin projects a manifold pounding dispersive vision, set off by the pulsing music composed by Denis Mariotte, the perfect acoustic counterpart to the visual tourbillon created by the choreographer and taking place on the stage.