Dancer and choreographer Gilles Jobin and visual artist Julius von Bismarck met during a residency at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Geneva. Working amongst the institution’s scientists, these two artists fused their universes together to create QUANTUM, a hymn to particle physics for six dancers. “How might the principles of quantum physics be used to activate concrete movement?” While this question led Jobin to approach dance from a new angle, Von Bismarck created an imposing light and sound sculpture. On stage, luminous variations and moving bodies are rendered sublime by the strange sonic particles of composer Carla Scaletti’s score.
An encounter through overlapping works, SYSTEMA OCCAM is an homage from a renowned contemporary artist, Xavier Veilhan, to a pioneer of contemporary music, Éliane Radigue. Drawing inspiration from the composer’s 2004 solo for harp, OCCAM I, Veilhan imagines a silent, visual prelude that gently entices the spectator into an aural experience. A flux of fragments of ritual scenes, everyday gestures and perceptive tricks gives way to the hypnotic sound of the harp, which is further magnified through the movements of Rhodri Davies.
With Urban Renewal, performer and director Kyle deCamp revisits memories of her childhood in 1960s Chicago. Starting out from an imagined collision between the history of her neighbourhood block and that of the world as a whole, she weaves together personal flashbacks and striking images to form a chronicle of an individual lost in a whirlwind of urbanisation, power and politics. On stage, an installation by videographer Joshua Thorson opens up a vertiginous field where the soloist appears to float in a multidimensional vision.
Revisiting a solo from 2008, choreographer and performer Ali Moini erases, undoes and makes anew. Lives is a personal narrative, an uncompromising self-portrait that embraces the fragmentation of identity and the impermanence of being. His body caught in a tangle of cables, the dancer tells his story through a sound installation conceived by artist and musician George Apostolakos. With his voice, his speech and his narrative multiplied through a meticulous system of amplification, Moini explores the complexity of the plural self.
Choreographer Mathilde Monnier and illustrator François Olislaeger’s piece, Qu’est-ce qui nous arrive ?!?, blends drawing with dance. Twenty men and women with no prior stage experience tap into their memories: whether at clubs, parties or school discos, they have all danced before at some time or another. These suspended moments are brought to life by a parade of speech bubbles drawn by Olislaeger, who projects silhouettes and bodies on the stage’s backdrop in a live exploration of the pictorial gesture.
In 2013, New Settings travels to New York for the first time. Three pieces supported by the Foundation feature at the Crossing the Line festival organised by the FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française). Two works from this third edition of New Settings – SYSTEMA OCCAM and Urban Renewal – are presented alongside a piece from the festival’s debut year, Passage à l’acte by Fanny de Chaillé and Philippe Ramette.
