A choreography for two dancers, with LED ticker displays and neon lights as only light source, NEONS Never Ever, Oh! Noisy Shadows deals with intimacy and separation, and verges on visual arts, following in the steps of 2011’s Black Out.
NEONS tells the story of two men about whom we know nothing, but who are going through a difficult time in their relationship. The action is refined, intense and at times, full of contained violence. Performed to a soundtrack featuring Maria Callas, the striking choreography strives on contrasts: power and intimacy, distance and violence, commitment and irony.
The piece is the second one of an ongoing series called Dispositifs – after Black Out and before Vacuum – in which a visual concept is at the start of the creation process. Here, the LED ticker displays and neon lights serve as light source, décor and subtext to the performance, while the neon lights produce unexpected nuances of grey and delineate the stage in the half-light.
“(…)the initial cheerfulness gives way to morbid nonsense. This feeling becomes even more vivid at the end of the 40-minute performance, when artificial fog starts enveloping the stage in a cloud of vapor, until it is reduced to a luminous red cloud. This final image is of rare beauty. (…)the choreograph is showing an unparalleled sense of artistic intelligence.”
Isabelle Jakob, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich
NEONS stems from a desire to work on the singular quality of neon light and its reflection on bodies and space, to use its particular grain and nuances of grey to generate moving images and to conceive of shadows as graphite or charcoal drawings; it stems from a decision to confront dance with the written word (displayed on live tickers) as a way to contrast the powerful eloquence of movement with the false obviousness, or the triviality even, of the written word.
Is it the light, which brings together and divides, which caresses and probes? Is it the inevitable shadows it carries or the struggle for power it might involve? The fact remains that it gradually dawned on me that ‘separation’ was the underlying idea of the performance: a ‘generic separation’, based on the quasi-chemical components of a break-up-in-progress, and focused on the physical effects of this deteriorating chemistry.
As it stands, the story of these two men and the state of their relationship is of little importance. Via their physical codes and the sensations that these codes provide, we simply enter into a particular moment in their lives.
The two men become more and more distant, although it is unclear why. As much as we would like to understand the cause, all we are given are anecdotes. The nature of the problem is beyond us.
Obviously, with two men on stage, we thought of this couple as homosexual. But obviously we consciously chose to treat this fact as something that was in no way unusual. Love is generic, as is breaking up -and divorce touches everyone.
Philippe Saire
The end of a love story
A couple, in the night-time, falling out of love… With his new dance show, Philippe Saire explores unchartered territories. We knew him to be playful, sombre and ironic. He is now deeply moving and more intimate than ever. His love story between two men is universal. Written in red letters on live ticker displays, intimate words move past –words that no one dares to pronounce, words that are spoken mechanically without belief. The words keep trickling, like blood flowing out of a wound: “Everything is over”, “I am a bastard”. The tickers are the only lights on stage, except for neon lights that the dancers manipulate. Saire is particularly good at using shadows to create pictures. Unconcerned with beauty, his contemporary aesthetic indirectly evokes the paintings of Caravaggio, or the candlelit scenes of Georges de la Tour. The man is there, in all his mystery, his frailty, and his limitations. He who isn’t loved anymore is rejected, as is the case when all love ends. With his visual approach, the choreographer touches on powerful feelings. And Maria Callas’ voice, singing Francesco Cilea’s opera Adriana Lecouvreur, adds to the feeling. Under our eyes, a hard and tense poem unfolds, a complete annihilation, to the last breath. Then the night becomes so sad that it turns to white.
Julien Burri, L’Hebdo, Switzerland
(…) the choreograph is showing an unparalleled sense of artistic intelligence.
(…) the initial cheerfulness gives way to morbid nonsense. This feeling becomes even more vivid at the end of the 40-minute performance, when artificial fog starts enveloping the stage in a cloud of vapor, until it is reduced to a luminous red cloud. This final image is of rare beauty.
Isabelle Jakob, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich
With his new show, Philippe Saire continues with his exploration of visual arts on stage. Neon lights set in mobile black crates are manipulated on stage in a way that that serves to sculpt light in spectacular shades of black and grey.
Other crates are inlaid with red LEDs, which display short sentences, thoughts and text excerpts, adding a slightly mysterious dimension to the performance.
The third element, obviously, is dance. There are two dancers, Philippe Chosson and Pep Garrigues, or rather, two bodies, involved in a tight confrontation that combines gestures, caresses and blows, which give rise to a fragile and cruel story of love and hate, between light and shadows, in a form of physical and gestural barrenness of remarkable strength. (…)
Pierre Lepori, Les Matinales / Radio Télévision Suisse
(…) The eye playfully looses track of, and then looks for the outlines of this strange anatomy, which regularly refers to a looming artistic heritage: Christ-like figures, silent actions. A choreographed history of painting, or a pictorial history of dance…
Marie Chavanieux, La Terrasse, Paris
