BLEU (2017)

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 ...