Du Vivant Sous Les Plis
Déplié (Unfolded)
World premiere planned for May 30- 31, 2020, but postponed to the fall of 2020 (because of the Covid-19 crisis)
Dance: Margot Dorléans
Drawing: Patrice Balvay
with the natural light in the garden and the dry leaves collected in the fall of 2019
Running time: 2h
Production : Du Vivant Sous Les Plis & l’Œ
With support from: the Normandy region, the city of Le Havre and the Grand Port Automne du Havre
Residency: La Bazooka au Wine and Beer,
le Havre
The choreographer’s principal inspiration is the renowned Japanese garden of the Grand Port of Le Havre, in which Margot Dorléans, dancer- choreographer, and Patrice Balvay, plastician and artist, create a performance piece blending dance and drawing.
The setting
The Japanese garden at the Grand Port of Le Havre was created in 1993 by Yasuko Miyamae and Samuel Craquelin, to celebrate the “sister city” relationship of the ports of Le Havre and Osaka (1980). It is like a little piece of Japan stuck between two historical pools in the middle of the city’s downtown.
It is built around a pond, fed by two rivers, whose lines, straight or rolling, extend from a small esplanade reserved for tea ceremonies, ornamented with two stone lanterns.
The garden
A space for contemplation, the Japanese garden is like a compressed landscape with its paths, its plains and valleys, its lawns, which we gradually discover and experience differently depending on if we spend a few minutes or a few hours there, as well as the season, the time of year.
The dances and drawings will be seen as overlapping interpretations of a specific place in different seasons, shown like an evolving in situ work and ensemble showing a changing landscape. The dance will in theory blend right into the landscape, becoming one with the materials, colors, elements, plants and minerals, experienced and revisited in different seasons. The sensory impression of these explorations will invite the bodies to become their own landscape. The drawings will be revealed, unrolled, unfolded, like sliding jointed panels which will organize the dancing.
Perhaps the dance and drawing, echoing each other, will act as another medium revealing the garden in its richness, its detail, where the invisible becomes visible in the dilation of the space-time in the performance.
This installation - performance will be like a flowing landscape rebuilt and concentrated (the experience of the garden) with this miniaturized, stylized form (the actual garden). As a Japanese garden is a transported, quite artificial landscape, this installation - performance can also be performed in other spaces, as if transposing a moving landscape.
The installation will be conceived to last several weeks in the garden, and also to change, to be altered depending on the climatic and plant evolution around it. The continuity and the transposition of the installation in other places will require a choice of adapted materials and research into the whole. As for the drawings created in the garden, they may be exhibited elsewhere, in a closed environment.