Symphony with machine

At the Indo-French Contemporary Dance Festival, Dominique Boivin's DanSe Dialogues presented an unusual pas de deux.

December 01, 2011 06:54 pm | Updated 06:55 pm IST

Transports exceptionnels. Photo: By Special Arrangement

Transports exceptionnels. Photo: By Special Arrangement

For the first time, an Indo-French Contemporary Dance Festival was held in India. Organised by the French Embassy, in association with Prakriti Foundation and Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai, DanSe Dialogues travelled to three cities in India and featured professional dancers from both continents, providing platforms for greater visibility and creative exchange.

‘Transports Exceptionnels' by Dominique Boivin, a famed choreographer, presented an unlikely duo of man and machine - the man, the lithe dancer Philippe Priasso, and the machine, a sturdy CAT Excavator 320D. The venue was as improbable - a muddy car park, that had been flattened out and the arena lit all around with white spotlights. The scene that was set for a dangerous clash turned instead into a graceful, perfectly timed pas de deux. Well, almost.

Rich operatic music accompanied Philippe as he bowed to the mighty machine and began his performance. Dressed formally in black dress pants and a white full-sleeved shirt, Philippe's only give-aways were his black gloves. With nimble movements, he moved around the machine as if taking measure; he mimicked its sweeping arm movements and dodged the bucket by inches as his familiarity with the machine grew strangely real. He finally clambered on defying gravity, as he stood 20-ft above the ground on a swiftly revolving bucket with his arms stretched out.

With the choreographer instructing the skilled Eric Lamy in the driver's seat through a walkie-talkie, the unwieldy excavator grew graceful in my eyes as it's hydraulic arm became Philippe's trusted dance partner, someone he could lean on, climb on, hang from or simply just avoid.

Spontaneous applause peppered the half-hour show as the acrobat-dancer kept the young audience on the edge of their seats. The dancer in Philippe never left him and even while he clung to the bucket upside down or was suspended on one arm at dizzy heights, his body was always straight and his toes pointed like a seasoned ballet artist. The most breathtaking moment was when the dancer slid off the bucket head first, gliding into a perfect hand stand as the bucket gently let him go. ‘Transports Exceptionnels' was truly exceptional.

What inspired Dominique Boivin to use the excavator in this piece? “I really don't know why I chose this machine; it might have to do with the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy in 2001. I wanted something positive to come out of it; I naively wanted to re-construct, so I considered the excavator a symbol of its reconstruction…,” he said.

Dominique's inspiration

Compiling his favourite and most powerful influences from films into a 70-minute film, ‘Cine Geste' with subtitles, Dominique Boivin seeks to explain the organic growth of his ideas and movement vocabulary.

Through the 20th century and until the present, ‘Cine Geste' captured a variety of creative impulses from the machine-like movements of the comic-tragic tramp in Charlie Chaplin's ‘Modern Times' to ‘the most beautiful man in the world' Paul Swan in ‘Diana the Huntress' to swing dancing in ‘Hellzapoppin' to the Nicholas Brothers' tap dancing in ‘Stormy Weather' to the latest from Youtube, ‘finger tutting' star JayFunk.

Precision marching by Japanese students who follow orders to change formations in a jiffy and a comic dance by four dancers on six running treadmills are only a few examples of the eclectic collection.

South Korean Drummers

A group of 18 South Korean children between the ages of 9 and 14 who are travelling for 10 months around the world from the Habanha School, entertained the crowd in between with their native songs and rhythms. The spirit of the children came shining through as they clapped and sang or acted out their songs or beat out sequences on traditional drums called ‘buk' with sticks. Uniformly dressed in white shirts and pyjamas and long, green robes, worn with scarves or bandanas around their heads, their half-an-hour presentation in a gazebo at the edge of the pond at Kalakshetra, brought home the notions of world citizenship when everyone speaks the same language of culture.

Dominique fact file

He started learning classical dance at the age of 6.

His godmother fed him with American comics and Charlie Chaplin videos that made a deep impression on him.

He thought classical dance would help him dance like Charlie Chaplin!

The subtitles in ‘Cine Geste' were facilitated by a Boivin-look alike performing Chaplinesque gestures.

Comedy acts, quirky-bordering-on-absurd acts and movements with saucy intent seemed highest on his list. An example is pantomime- Jerry Lewis' ‘The Errand Boy.'

Experimental films with a comic-artistic twist inspired him-‘Neighbours' and ‘Chairy Tale' by Canadian filmmaker, Norman Mc Laren, ‘Mon Oncle' and ‘Playtime' by French filmmaker Jacques Tattis.

Music and music videos by R and B singers, ‘Temptations' (My Girl) and Rock and Roll number ‘Dreamlovers' by Bobby Darin.

Dancers-choreographers who inspired him- Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Pina Bausch, Vaslav Nijinsky, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, et al.

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