Vifs! Une danse macabre en son jardin is an in-situ promenade performance for 3 dancers, updated to connect with place memories.
How do the dead - beings and works of art - make us move? How do they enrich the present through dance? Who are the dead and who are the living?
Inspired by French medieval frescos and by the Danse Macabre (1935) by German choreographer Sigurd Leeder, the show Vifs ! Une danse macabre en son jardin celebrates the dead at each site it is performed in by giving them time, movement, and attention in the form of a danse macabre. The performance is a hieratic and enigmatic promenade of three dancers moving through the site’s spaces, inviting audience members to follow the geometry of their dance. Walking at a solemn pace to the soft beat of a drum, the dancers trace out the emotional architecture and illuminate the vestiges of the past. Their gestures, delicate or strident, bring place-memories to life and echo the ghosts of Sigurd Leeder’s Danse Macabre, which is projected onto the walls in the site. Convoking the absent, the dancers abandon themselves to emotion before disappearing into the distance in a carnival-like dancing procession.
Vifs! Une danse macabre en son jardin allows historic sites to be perceived in a different way, letting the memory of the dead emerge through dance.
Conception, artistic director: Anne Collod
Choreography: Anne Collod in collaboration with the performers, à based on Sigurd Leeder’s Danse Macabre
Performance: Jonas Chéreau, Fabrice Ramalingom or Laurent Pichaud, Agathe Thévenot
Music: Pierre-Yves Macé
Costumes: La Bourette
Production: Association … & alters.
Coproduction: Brétigny theatre; La Maison, CDCN Uzès, Gard, Occitania; Pont Saint-Esprit Town.
The association … & alters receives support from the Regional cultural affaires directorate (DRAC) for the Île-de-France via a structuration grant.
Théâtre de Brétigny for the Dedans Dehors programme in the church at Puiselet-le-Marais (91), 28th May 2017. La Maison-CDCN Uzès, Gard, Occitania for the European Heritage Days at the Collegiate Church in Pont Saint-Esprit (30), on the 21st and 22nd September 2019.