Miles to go before we sleep…

A workshop – creation by Chloé Beillevaire

We spend a good deal of our time fearing that we might be idiots and we hold back from a host of important aspirations and ambitions. We should shake ourselves from such inhibitions by loosening our hold on any remaining sense of dignity and by accepting frankly that we are –  by nature – of course completely idiotic.

Dancing provides us with a primordial occasion on which this basic idiocy can be publicly displayed and communally celebrated. On a dance floor filled with comparable idiots, we can delight our foolishness; we can throw off our customary shyness and fully embrace our dazzling strangeness and derangement.

Miles to go before we sleep present a multitude of individualities who navigates between pictorial coherence and emergence of heterogeneous proposals. Inspired by the paintings of Caravaggio, Theodore Géricault, Paul Rubens and Roberto Ferri, they draw perspectives and create links between them, space and time. They dive into religious, war, love and scenes of joy in which they push their feelings to the extreme to reach a climax that often slides towards ridicule.

By giving free rein to their imagination, they enjoy the complexity of human relationships; love, desire, misunderstanding, perversion, conflict, benevolence, solidarity, egotism… They walk through feminine and masculine stereotypes and subtly oscillate from one to the other without questioning the image that their bodies convey or symbolize. Realized from aprioris, clichés, prejudices they get carried away by the dance in a strange game, without rules, full of humor and provocations.

Miles to go before we sleep invites you to be free of propriety, to ignore your age, gender, to play with social codes, get rid of apprehensions and prejudices in order to regain joy, pleasure, fascination,childlike creativity and simply find back the freedom to dance.

We will spend the first hours of the day exploring various physical qualities. The slowmotion will serve both as a link to all choreographic proposals and as a basis for the emergence of individual qualities. Taking inspiration from sculptures and paintings, we will have fun bending and twisting our bodies to reach various emotional states.

We will play with the imbrication of corpses on the ground, the elevation of bodies in the air which will lead us to work on partnering and floorwork. The afternoons will be devoted to group improvisations and composition of living paintings from which will emerge scenes that we will refine day after day.