Upon the invitation of Petter Jacobsson, director of the Choreographic Centre of Nancy, Loïc Touzé is invited to create a piece in collaboration with the dancers of the Ballet of Lorraine.
NOTE OF INTENTION:
I began my life with dance as a child at the Paris Opera, and I left this institution as a young adult with the feeling that I was emerging from a forest of movements and gestures, in the direction of dance.
It has now been over thirty years, and during this odyssey I have sometimes felt lost, sometimes amazed, I have often doubted and I have learned to see and recognize the subtle spaces in which dance exists.
I now understand that dance appears willingly on one condition : that the dancer withdraws, as though there weren't enough space on stage for both the dancer and the dance. For the dancer, this paradox is undoubtably the most difficult thing to achieve.
To come to meet the dancers of the CCN-Ballet of Lorraine, to invent a piece with them, is like coming back to the forest, towards the night of my beginnings.
And I remember the words of Gilles Deleuze : « The forest is not defined by a form, it is defined by a force : the force that makes trees grow, and that does so until it can't anymore.
The only question that I can ask the forest is not : what is your face and what are your contours ?
The only question that I can ask the forest is : what is your force ? Which means : how far will you go ? »
To dance is to perform something broader than oneself, to charge our gestures with active force, to invent a destination, to reach something or someone.
It's also to jump outside oneself and to risk a sway, a hesitation, a blunder.
Once they are performed, what do these dances become ? Where do they go ?
Do they continue to affect things, beings and ideas ?
Before all the subjects, themes and ideas begin to assert themselves, I need to meet the dancers of the piece that we will compose together. There are of course some initial intentions, for example, Antiphon the Sophist's concept of arhythmiston : the unformed, the unorganised, the unstructured, the most fundamental part of being, the passive matter that receives the rhythm.
That's where I imagine that the music of the piece dwells, in the hollow that we induce so that a gesture can occur.
From our exchange dances will be born, we will follow them, tune them to one another, they are the piece.
Loïc Touzé