Laurence Yadi & Nicolas Cantillon
Company 7273
Listen & Watch - Romance-s | Choreographic works 2009
Crédit photo : Michel Cavalca“Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon have put together a piece of work of fierce sensuality. How so? Because each and every movement comes from their own invention and from a retrospective look back, from Lancelot and Guinevere, to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in “A Bout de souffle,” to Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in the recent film, Two Lovers. From the courtly love of knights and the up-in-the-air kind of romanticism of Jean-Luc Godard, to the trace of adolescence that some adults retain throughout their lives. Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon don’t rest on their laurels; they have too much pride in their work for that. They rise up, become entangled, like the roots of a baobab tree and let go when the embrace becomes too much to bear.”
From a review of Romance-s in the Swiss periodical Le Temps by Alexandre Demidoff, September 2009
“And so, in this performance what we see coming about is the most incredible array of images: the crucifixion of Christ, the joy expressed by a player or fan when a goal is scored, Hitler’s sig heil and James Bond with gun in hand.”
From a review of Listen and Watch (Climax reprised) in Journal d’adc, a Swiss periodical, by Myriam Kridl, January 2006
The Performers
Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi / Company 7273
A strange little troupe, one that tries to figure out what it actually means to dance a dance that occurs before our eyes and takes shape as it goes along, that leaves its own obscure trace in the sands it crosses.
The French choreographers Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi split their professional lives between Switzerland and France. After performing as a singer and guitarist with the group Cryse 17, Nicolas Cantillon began training as a dancer in 1989 at the Marius Petipa Conservatory.
Laurence Yadi finished her studies in sports education in 1991. Two years later, she received a scholarship to study at the Alvin Ailey Center in New York.
By the end of their respective training periods, both began numerous collaborations as performers and assistant choreographers, sometimes within the same company, most notably for the Ballet J. Art in Paris and the Geneva company Alias, where they worked with Gisela Rocha and Rui Horta.
Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi created their first piece in 2003 with La vision du lapin (Vision of the Rabbit), which was a meditation on codes of representation. With Simple Proposition, in 2004, they took up a study on the idea of the duet by breaking down their movements. The work inspired a short film called Durée determinée (“Determined Duration”) which they co-produced in 2005 with Frédéric Lombard and Jennifer Bonn.
In 2006 they created Climax, a solo piece that sketches the secret passage from joy to melancholy in a sustained blur and for which the company received the Lietchi Foundation Prize for the Arts. In 2007, they created On Stage, which was a condensed version of Climax where they explored time and rhythm.
That same year, they created Merry-go-round for the Junior Ballet of Geneva, reconfiguring the model provided by Climax and adopting it for the requirements of the Ballet.
Starting in 2007, they began working on a trilogy of pieces created to understand how folk music impacts the art of creativity. The first part of this trilogy, which is a prelude to Lai lai lai lai, In Concert, was created in 2008 as a piece for four dancers.
In 2009, they followed up the creation of Climax with Listen and Watch, working with American composer and guitarist Richard Bishop from Seattle. In September of that same year, Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon took up themes of the heart with the duo Romance-s.
Sir Richard Bishop, Guitarist
As a founding member of the Ethno-improv pioneers Sun City Girls (1981-2007), American guitarist Richard Bishop spent twenty-six years of his life perplexing, astonishing and alienating audiences. In early 2005, he toured solo, appearing across Europe, Australia and the United States. Accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, he has performed with “Prince” Billy, Ben Chasny, Six Organs of Admittance, Espers, Devendra Banhart and many other artists.
His guitar solos have explored the musical worlds of India and the Middle East, as well as gypsy music. The influence of Django Reinhardt as well as Jimmy Page and Ravi Shankar can be detected in his work.
Discography:
- Salvador Kali 1998 John Fahey’s Revenant Label
- Improvika 2004 Locust music
- Fingering the Devil 2006 Southern Records, UK
- Elektronika Domonika 2006 Locust Music
- While My Guitar Violently Bleeds 2007 Locust Music
- Polythestic Fragments 2007 Drag City
Program (1 hour 30 minutes) Choice of one
Romance-s (45 minutes) is a duo performed by the two dancer/choreographers Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon. The performance will be followed by a thirty-minute session with the artists and a screening of the film Durée Determinée (Determined Duration), lasting ten minutes, which they produced with the video artist Frédéric Lombard.
Or
Listen & Watch (40 minutes) brings together on stage the dancer/choreographer Nicolas Cantillon and the American guitarist Sir Richard Bishop. The performance will be followed by a thirty-minute session after the performance where the audience members will have a chance to meet the performers. This will be followed by a solo performance of On Stage by Laurence Yadi. The evening’s concluding performance will last ten minutes.
Workshops and additional opportunities to meet the performers
In conjunction with the performances offered by Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon, the choreographers will make themselves available to the organizers for other appearances, according to the interests of each city, ie. meeting with local dancers and choreographers or giving a master class and/or workshops for amateurs or professionals.
Comments on the choreographic works
Romance-S (performers: Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi)
Romance-s sets for itself the task of looking into and expressing the ”in betweeness” of bodies, the mutual space belonging to love and dance. What is this body I love? What is this body I’m dancing with? What are the different states of these bodies? What does that tell me about my own body? Each viewer makes up his or her mind.
Romance-s goes to the heart of love to bring the whole experience to light. The trajectory of the work explores the territory of the couple and that of dance, the one and the other dedicated to the way lovers and dancers join together, become transformed, and ask either other questions. The plural ending, clearly and unambiguously separated from the rest of the title, proclaims the universal character of the statement.
Romance (whether it be a Spanish poem written in metered verse of eight beats or a sentimental love song), evokes the common ground between every love story, reinventing places of mutual experience with absolute sincerity. As a result of the dancers’ commitment to the shared space between them, the piece becomes more and more of a dialogue with the viewer as it progresses.
The ending also suggests the many different directions made possible by the performance, which goes beyond certain recognizable references and imitations, continuing to reach indistinct areas of sensation, as if attempting to grasp waking dreams. The gestures are accentuated by slow motion which breaks down the chain of movement with seismographic precision. The effect of dilating time in this manner is increased tension. The bodies turn about each other, provoking each other, concealing themselves in a progressive flux that causes the antagonistic figures to alternate between contact and separation, embracing each other and harming each other, standing solid and then starting to sway, holding on and slipping away. . .
One body always sets the other in motion, in a subtle interaction in where powers are distributed, measured and exchanged. Sometimes it seems the dancers take turns being predator and prey, struggling for their survival or their territory. One of the dominating forces of the work is gravity, which Bachelard defined as “the constant destiny to overcome.” Everyone is influenced by each other’s gravity. Each tiny little initiative gathers strength with the others and becomes intensified in a flamenco suddenly taken up by the choreographers.
Listen & Watch (Climax, revisited – performers: Nicolas Cantillon and Sir Richard Bishop)
Corps sauvage (Wild Body), musical folly by Bishop
Corps léger (Light Body), Constraint of the Fixity of Movement by Cantillon
In 2006, Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon composed the score Climax, a forty-minute solo performed by Nicolas Cantillon, without interruption and in silence, for which he was awarded the Lietchi Foundation Prize for the Arts.
All movement is massed toward the center of the stage and the composition imposes the constraint of never repeating the same movements. Structured around a succession of emblematic images borrowed from the history of dance, sports and politics, the work clouds over any clear determination of these indicators giving the idea and definition of “climax.” From crucifixion to the raised fist of the Black Panther and an homage to Faune by Nijinski, each image plays a role in the performance.
In 2007, Yadi and Cantillon discovered the work of guitarist Sir Richard Bishop, which led to a rereading of Climax.
“Then we heard Sir Richard Bishop play and it was plain as day. He improvises and creates through his own instincts. He’s in touch with a kind of basic animal spirit. We work in a way that is entirely identical.”
This music seemed to them to be able to replace the silences of Climax, thereby modifying the way the work was seen and displacing the focal point, due to the presence of a musician on stage.
Electric, romantic, discrete, bluesy, . . . the American and his guitar has it all. He plays like a dance that winds itself around people, like a conga, like coiling around something with a feeling of never wanting to unwind and leave. With his experimental music, his Sun City Girls and his world of Indian, Gypsy and African influences, he knows how to mix together elements in order to open others up.
Links
http://www.cie7273.com/
http://www.cie7273.com/06_video_10.html (Romance-S)
http://www.cie7273.com/06_video_09.html (Listen & Watch)
http://www.sirrichardbishop.net/
http://www.myspace.com/sirrichardbishop
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