The origin of the project was a series of experiments carried out in galleries and exhibitions, where the dancers performed in visual counterpoint to works of art already on show.

The three pieces making up this work are linked by an attempt to initiate a dialogue between the choreographer and the artists. It was expected that due to the widely diverse backgrounds of each, the result of every interaction would be different and completely unpredictable.

The reality was even stranger. From the beginning, at each rehearsal we found ourselves adrift in an elusive, uncontrolled situation permeated by a vague sense of powerlessness and insecurity.

It was as though the rather formal concept of building a bridge between dance and pictorial art had found an echo in other, unsuspected planes outside the influences of the works and movements themselves. As though we had become possessed by something unsuspected, something which gradually, through the links and constraints, the attachments and separations, the breaks and reconciliations inherent in our endeavours, became the driving force for the entire work. Something not of ourselves.

For us, these three pieces reflect the strangeness of our experience during their creation. They are of us, but are not ours -we rehearse and we perform them, but frequently we are surprised by our own interpretation.

All three pieces speak of passings between planes, and of the resistance encountered in attempting to pass. At the same time, they question the sacrifices imposed, and the losses conceded, in the transformations such passings demand.

Each passing is a movement and a direction; sometimes one way, sometimes the other, now logical, now unexpected. To and fro, backwards and forwards, like a perpetual palindrome.

Philippe Saire

A secret, strange and fascinating ceremony, … Le Palindrome offers and hour and a half of that poetry-in-motion whose secrets Philippe Saire keeps for himself.
24 Heures Lausanne (CH) 1995

Danced with dramatic propulsion and great nuance by the six formidable performers of Compagnie Philippe Saire, Le Palindrome can be seen through Sunday at the MCA. […] The piece is as profound as it is profoundly beautiful. The dancers capture the subtlest fibrillations of the heart and mind.
Chicago Sun Times (USA) 1998

Yaman, le MAD, Claude Ros, Chantal Michetti, Philippe de Rham, Marie-Claude Jequier, Mme Vauthey, M. Burgdorfer, Urs Stauffer, Odile Ferrard, Pierre Neumann, Serge Rochat, Jean-Claude Rochat, Bernard Kraehenbuehl, Jacques Richter.