Dance Week Festival

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choreography:Thierry Smits

interpreters:Benjamin Bac, Lucius Romeo-Fromm, Michael Sears, Erica Trivett

soundscape and composition:Maxime Bodson

music: Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons

texts: Peter Verhelst (Fluid Mechanics), Caroline Lamarche (Moss&Mould)

set design and accessories: Peter Maschke

lighting design and technical coordination:Thomas Beni

images and dramaturgy: Jacques André

costumes :Olivier Bériot

Production Compagnie Thor

In association with Kaaitheater, Théâtre de la Balsamine, CNCDC Châteauvallon

With the support of Ministère de la Communauté française de Belgique, Service de la Danse;

Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique

about the performance

V.-Nightmares is a choreographic project of which the realisation covers a whole year, from winter 2006 to autumn 2007. Each climatologic season sees the creation of an independent piece in which one of the parts of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are used. Each piece (Fluid Mechanics for spring, TAN for summer, Moss & Mould for autumn and ICE for winter) unites the same group of artists: a choreographer, four dancers, a set designer and a lighting designer. Certain pieces see, moreover, the contribution of a writer.

Like a perennial pictorial legacy, the metamorphosis of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons into a sombre, lucid “Vanity”, a nightmare in four variations, makes us think about the passing of time and presence of death. Outside all religions and the antipodes of all psychological portraits, this new production by Thierry Smits cultivates all the resources of the body on stage in its abilities to carry the ambivalence of our climaxes and our pain.

Following this vein, Thierry Smits explores an artistic collective’s abilities to metamorphose four dancers into performers able to work a moving set by Peter Maschke, into the vectors of original texts by Peter Verhelst and Caroline Lamarche, into shameless amateur video filmmakers following Jacques André’s instructions, into the carriers of Thomas Beni’s lights, and finally into the agents of Maxime Bodson’s sound production.

These metamorphoses, underlined by Olivier Bériot’s costumes, lead to a poetics of bodies and space that spawns a questioning of live art in which the composition also interrogates the fragility of creation, the dancers, and the audience’s practices or expectations.

These baroque decentrings, reversals, and unfoldings are mirrored in the sound metamorphoses of Vivaldi’s masterpiece and feed off those of the matter that is connected to each season on the set: fluids in the spring, fire in the summer, organic matter in the autumn, and ice in the winter.

The nightmare dances all over and unfurls an ambivalence linking climactic joy and morbidity with the double foci of culture and nature, humans and the universe. The variations on nakedness in all its states – associated with desire at times, disease at others, burning, the conquered mortal remains, or even cadaveric rigidity – are striking signs of this. Each climax – sexual, solar, predatory, or morbid – reveals its opposite in line with the seasons: biological contamination, irradiation, the power of violence, or the death-dealing, sterilising power of the world. Some might catch therein tantalising glimpses of the seasons that govern our age: the spring of corporeal fetichising in the prison of a look; the summer of the fascination of dehumanisation; the autumn of the dislocation of social ties; and the winter of the world’s sterilisation.

These perspectives’ vanishing points are found in a baroque general aesthetics to which the Four Seasons gives birth via its questioning of a problematic aesthetic heritage and the assembly of contrasting forms. So, the colours and materials of spring are largely “pop”, before sliding into a “modernist” summer that asserts the effacement of individuality; the mad baroque of autumn then relativises the various visions of humankind; whilst winter clings to the violent expressionism of a hot-and-cold contrast in the black and white of life and death.

The nightmare can continue to dance in these myriads of folds and metamorphoses, certain of coming across our various imaginary worlds and turning them into stages on which it can proliferate.

about the choreographer

Born in Koersel (Belgium), Thierry Smits studied ballet and modern dance in Brussels and Paris. After a short career as a dancer, he soon began choreographing.

With his first choreography, La Grâce du tombeur, presented in 1990 at the Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels, he quickly gained international acclaim in the world of contemporary dance. Since then, he has been a tireless choreographer for his own company and other theatre companies and groups.

In his performances, oscillating between pure dance and dramatization, and in which his technical rigour and his gestural inventiveness are always present, mankind’s relationship to sex and the sacred frequently occupies a central role. The body – as object of desire, pleasure and finiteness – has been the very subject of Thierry Smits’ choreographic research over the past several years. This is not only because the body is obviously the matter and tool of the choreographer’s trade, but also with Eros délétère (1991), followed by the solo Cyberchrist (1995), Corps(e) (1998); and Red Rubber Balls (1999), Thierry Smits has founded his work upon the very notion of corporeality and the tensions that exist between the climaxing body, the ‘body as sex’, and the intimately diseased body that is doomed to disappear.

In addition to his work focused on complex subjects and linked to an element ‘outside’ dance, Thierry Smits concentrates on dance itself – referring to nothing other than itself -, as he had done for the first time in Soirée dansante (1995). With Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (2001), Dionysos’ Last Day / Stigma (2003) and D’ORIENT (2005), he continues this line begun previously, here giving priority to a study of form, choreographic composition, and the search for movement.

Thierry Smits’ work was recognized in 1995 when he received the SACD-Belgium prize, and again in 1998, for his creation Corps(e), for which he received the Belgium Océ prize for the performing arts of the French speaking community.