BLEU (2017)
Blue
BLEU ©Laurent Paillier
It all starts with a color that has remained silent for a long time : Blue. No value, no symbol, was associated with it. It entered the social field only in the 12th century and became alternately Marian, royal, moral, then popular.
Blue explores the movement of this color, emerging from the darkness and racing towards the light, inside a rectangular device, surrounded by an unfathomable black and ringed in a diaphanous white. This geometrical form, which does not exist in the natural state, gives this device a monolithic appearance which presence remains to be clarified, but within which some sketches will be born : the royal body, overfilled with History and pomp, its silhouette recognizable by the rectitude that such a weighty constraint demands, the powerful body stripped of its blue collar, the light body of the bathers ...
This permanent birth is accompanied by a sound design that evolves, from textures with indistinct lines to rhythms, the meaningful sound of a river, to end up in a music that could be eternal.
First there is nothing, then there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue.
Gaston Bachelard
To consider the blue color as the White's completed form, final stage before the Black, suspended time which contemplates the ephemeral until the dissolution.
Every stain of blue, even the smallest one, carries with it a sense of eternity.
The contemplation of the blue color stimulates the main lines of the body born from emptiness, which presence manifests itself as a perpetual actualization of the human being, oscillating between the massive appearance of the flesh and the vaporous existence of the figures that it embodies.
Blue works like an echo chamber ...
The chosen device gives shape to the auratic dimension that envelops the bodies. Its monolithic form is forgotten behind its transparency.
It can appear anywhere, like a puddle can be found in the hollow of a hole chiseled into the stone, the earth or the pavement, and it deploys, like the Blue, fleeting evocations to question the eye that is never satisfied.
Blue, as a vibratory moment, opens the door of the irreconcilable tension between the thickness of the material and the blurriness of forms, "decrystallizing" the images that could have been fixed on our retinas in order to favor the enigmatic moment of the flow itself. Because under the depths of the blue magma, we can find all the possibilities of a dreamed body.
Marie Reverdy, for La Zampa
Device designed for different types of places :
Theaters / Multifunctional Rooms / Concert Halls (in the pit or on stage)
Gyms / Churches, Chapels / Hangars / Barns (adapted) / Rehearsal Rooms and
Dance Studios / Halls / Small Amphitheatres / Brownfields ...
Device BLEU ©Denis Rateau
BLEU >>> Off site
Festival PARTERRE 1st edition - July 4, 2023
Olivier Hespel
for the festival Uzès Danse 2017
With this new creation, we are invited by Magali Milian and Romuald Luydlin to experiment abstraction and to taste "the pleasure of entering the depths", to use their own words. Because if the blue color is their starting point, their ambition is not to take you into the immensity of a cloudless sky or to make you smell the sweetness of lavender : they prefer to consider their blue as a last breath before blackness.
Both hidden and exposed within a narrow cube of dark tulle, two bodies derive from one metamorphosis to another. In a close proximity with the audience, they play with substances and flesh, the tangible and the barely perceptible ...
More disturbing and mysterious than dark and disquieting, their deep blue draws another time-space, strongly plural and contrasted. An experience of the senses. A disturbing immersion. As inspiring as it is sucking you up.
INTERVIEW
Olivier Hespel : What is the starting point of BLUE ?
Magali Milian : The desire for a writing method that would be based on a form of beginning. We had this intention with this project - and it is a bit difficult to describe - to be where the image appears, we do not know what, but something begins, takes shape, and time and the eye are responsible for naming it ... That's how the blue color in its appearance interested us. (...) This desire for an emergence that would be a little bit immaterial quickly involved a reflection around the particular format that was needed for this type of desire to be materialized. We also wanted this project to exist and be performed in new places for us. (...) In 2011, we created Requiem. This piece had the chance to be played in unusual places, even unlikely ones. But who says different places (outside the theaters), also says each time a complex scenic adaptation and a relationship to find with the audience for each place. (...) With BLUE, we wanted to return to this type of experimentation but this time with an object really thought about, in terms of device, to find its place in many configurations, and allowing us to explore with this choreographic object places which have been seldom visited by contemporary dance, while seeking a form of proximity with the audience.
Olivier Hespel : And what is the particularity of this device, precisely ?
Magali Milian : It had to be able to function out of context, and therefore be a scene in itself. We also wanted it to attract the eyes and focus attention. And that it can contain the images as well as make them emerge. For it seemed important to us that this question of the emergence of blue, its bubbling, its thickness, resonates in this chosen device. This is how we came up with the idea of a box in black tulle measuring three meters by four. A geometric shape that looks like a monolith, both opaque and transparent.
Olivier Hespel : Why this tulle between the audience and the dancers, this kind of barrier so to speak, since you want to work with proximity ?
Magali Milian : This black tulle allows us to have a closed surface but not locked up. It allows a filter to write the light and to work the materials. It also makes it possible to play with perceptions and create a distance with reality : to accelerate the imagination of the audience. (...) But it can also, depending on the angles and intensities of lights, disappear completely. A very raw proximity with the audience is then possible ... By the use of tulle, the notion of barrier of which you were talking about becomes very elastic : an essential movement for the eye that watches.
Olivier Hespel : The play that takes place in this black cube, you called it BLUE ... Why this choice ?
Magali Milian : The best answer to this question would be this sentence of Gaston Bachelard : "First there is nothing, then there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue. (...)" We also wanted a simple title, that could work as a gateway, an invitation ...
Choreography Magali Milian and Romuald Luydlin
With Magali Milian and Anna Vanneau
Music Marc Sens
Direction and sound control Valérie Leroux
Lighting design Denis Rateau
Costumes Lucie Patarozzi
Dramaturgical collaboration Marie Reverdy
Scenography Magali Milian, Romuald Luydlin, Denis Rateau
Construction structure Atelier du Théâtre de Nîmes
Production La Zampa
Co-production CDC Uzès Danse, Collectif En Jeux, Scènes Croisées – Scène conventionnée de Lozère, Théâtre de Nîmes Scène conventionnée pour la Danse contemporaine, Le Périscope Nîmes, Les Sept Collines Scène conventionnée de Tulle, ICI - Centre chorégraphique national Montpellier - Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée / Direction Christian Rizzo - dans le cadre du programme «résidence croisée».
Workshops Théâtre L’Albarède Ganges, Théâtre du Centre Français de Berlin, Le Périscope Nîmes, Les Sept Collines Scène conventionnée de Tulle, Montpellier Danse, L’Atelier des Songes Mende.
This show is supported by Réseau en Scène Languedoc-Roussillon in the framework of Collectif En Jeux. Thanks to Atelier Tuffery, jeans made in France since 1892
La Zampa is supported by DRAC Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée (Aide aux compagnies conventionnées), Région Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée and Département du Gard.
CALENDAR
// March 9, 2024
Le Parvis, scène nationale Tarbes Pyrénées
14:30 et 20:30 in Lourdes, Espace Robert Hossein
// March 7, 2024
Le Parvis, scène nationale Tarbes Pyrénées
20:30 in Arreau, Le Terminus
// July 4, 2023
Festival Parterre, Plaigne (09)
// February 1st, 2023
Festival ICI&LA, LA PLACE DE LA DANSE CDCN Toulouse Occitanie
------
Re-creation :
// April 16 to 22, 2022
Les Hivernales CDCN Avignon
-----
// April 2, 2020 >>>> POSTPONED (due to security measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic)
New date // November 19, 2020
Musée du Saut du Tarn, in collaboration with ADDA du Tarn, Centre d'Art Le LAIT and GMEA Centre National de Création Musicale d'Albi - Tarn (Fr)
// May 21, 2019
Scène Nationale de Sète et du Bassin de Thau
// May 9, 2019
L'Estive, Scène Nationale de Foix et de l'Ariège
// January 16, 2018
Les Sept Collines Scène conventionnée de Tulle
// June 10, 2017
Uzès Danse, Centre de développement chorégraphique de l’Uzège, du Gard et du Languedoc Roussillon
// May 24, 2017
Le Périscope, Nîmes
// May 16, 2017
Communauté des Communes Lodévois et Larzac, Lodève
// March 22, 2017
Scènes Croisées de Lozère, Théâtre de Villefort
// March 21, 2017
Scènes Croisées de Lozère, Théâtre Municipal à Bagnols-les-Bains / PREMIÈRE