A female dancer on scene in an empty space. Her presence and her capacity of producing presentness, sublime, somewhere between the others and the space, between space and time. All her mastery, all her places, all her present and presence.

Sublime

who is noticeable, that provokes admiration
which comes from above, that is located high up
referring to something, someone or a situation
that elevates, moves and transports us
the supreme degree of beauty

beyond reason and expression, between fear, ecstasy and pain

 

Now

There is a history that belongs to the dancer. A history that sometimes blends itself with another history, that of the sublime. Between one history and the other, there is a mystery. Mystery as mastery, as extraordinary capacity of producing beauty. Beyond.

The history of the sublime begins with the Greek philosopher Longinus and his discussion on how to make an orator capable of moving or persuading an audience. Instruction and ecstasy. According to him, the sublime has already been used to indicate the effect of grandiosity in speech and in poetry; to indicate a sense of divine; for the contrast between the limitations of the human perception and the amazing majesty of nature; as proof of the triumph of nature and imagination over reason; and, mainly recently, to mean something that goes beyond reason and expression. Behind laguage. Unspeakable.

The experience of the sublime often unveils the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of that which could be beyond these limits. A moment where the capacity of conceiving, of producing and expressing a thought or a sensation is destroyed. Nevertheless, through this failure, the spirit experiences something that is beyond thought and language.

Considering the notion of the sublime as sensorial lucidity, infinitude, as expansion of the present, Now proposes itself as a moment of production of the sublime based on the underlying reality of the choreographic activity, its very materiality. That is, a body in movement in constant transference of weight, transit, self transportation. Henri Bergson in “Matter and memory” locates the place of movement as the place of the present. At each moment, movement changes in terms of quality and in terms of presence. To render this experience common is the desire of Now.

Residencies 

Ménagérie  de  Verre, Paris

Centre  National  de  la Danse – CND, Paris

CCN de Tours, Tours

Centre National de la Danse – CNDC, Angers

Teatro  Cacilda  Becker – Funarte, Rio de Janeiro,

Support

CulturesFrance

Funarte

Choreography | creation  Gustavo Ciriaco (Brazil)
Performance | creation Annabelle Pulcini (France)
Light design Nicolas Boudier (France)
Production One Life Stand

Andrea Sonnberger

Nicolas Boudier