Laï laï laï laï
Compagnie 7273 (Switzerland – France) | Choreographical project by Laurence Yadi, Nicolas Cantillon in collaboration with Alexandre Joly and Régis Marduel
Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi, the two ‘enfants terribles’ of the Franco-Swiss dance scene, are offering us a musical and choreographic variation on glossolalia. Following Climax, Simple proposition and La vision du lapin, their first creations which laid down, through our eyes, their peculiar ‘physical grammar’, the company 7273 now grab our ears.
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Choreographical project by: Laurence Yadi, Nicolas Cantillon in collaboration with Alexandre Joly and Régis Marduel
Interpretation: Nicolas Cantillon, Alexandre Joly, Régis Marduel, Laurence Yadi
Lighting design: Jean-Philippe Roy
Costumes realisation: Mathilde Gallay Keller, Maria Galvez
Guitar and songs: Nicolas Cantillon
Sound environment: Alexandre Joly
Artistic collaboration: Graziella Jouan
Production: Compagnie 7273 (Switzerland – France)
Coproduction: Les Subsistances, Lyon (F), O Espaco do Tempo, Montemor-o-novo (P), Dampfzentrale, Berne (CH), Gessnerallee, Zurich (CH)
Supports: Pro Helvetia – Fondation Suisse pour la culture, Etat de Genève – Département de l’instruction publique, Ville de Genève – Département des affaires culturelles, Loterie romande, DRAC Rhône-Alpes, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Adami, Spedidam, Conseil Général de la Haute-Savoie et Fondation Corymbo / mediathek tanz.ch
Places of creation: Studios de l’ADC, Genève – Les Subsistances, Lyon – O Espaco do Tempo, Montemor-o-novo
The tour is supported by Pro Helvetia – Arts Council of Switzerland and Ville de Genève – Département de la culture
About the show: The dance as an urge to play
After the solitary incandescence of Climax, the company 7273 proposes a piece for four dancers, Laï laï laï laï, which places the spectator in an undefined space between folk concert and phantasmagoria.
At the origin of the project was an aspiration of the company to put themselves to the test, to depart from their speciality and venture into musical composition and song. A wish to distort or misrepresent themselves, to become clumsy and awkward, to claim a form of innocence as the regenerating principle of creation. Following the example of Henri Michaux whose practice as a painter completed the inadequacies of the poetic language: “It is for having liberated me from words, those clinging partners, that my drawings soar upwards and are almost joyful. In them I see a new language, turning their back on the verbal, the liberators” (Mouvements).
This change of register works well: the usual vocabulary of the company, rather minimalist, henceforth makes full use of all the resources of stage design. Beginning with the folk music, original guitar composition played live by Nicolas Cantillon and sung by him in gibberish, a deliberate desire to distance himself from the posture of “singer with a message”…
Buttoned up tight in his sixties costume, Nicolas Cantillon is the mediator with another world, a sort of smuggler David Lynch style. The concert structures the space within which three characters disport themselves: Laurence Yadi, Alexandre Joly and Régis Marduel offer us a vision of fauns wearing masks, hairpieces and homespun frocks.
Three hieroglyphs, three intermediary creatures, three monstrous representatives of a forgotten territory: the psychological power of the costume which accomplishes a kind of return to the origins, in the manner of a dream. On this carpet, a veritable playground, relationships can be woven between these characters ; an interplay of forms that invites chance and the encounter with the others…
Punctuating the action, a sound track orchestrated by Alexandre Joly, whose acuity and shrewdness work wonders here, seems to subtract a little more reality from the play and refer to a score that has been partly effaced. Laï laï laï laï functions like an open programme whose constituents produce fantasies. Far from all fossilized nostalgia, the company invites us to a rite of passage, both stimulating and salutary.
“Come a little bit closer (…)
just like children sleeping (…)
we can dream this night away (…)
because I’m still in love with you
I wanna see you dance again…”
Neil Young, Harvest moon.
Graziella Jouan
About the choreographers
Following a “sports-etudes” (sports + study) course in Paris, Laurence Yadi was awarded a grant to study at the Alvin Ailey Center in New York. She then came back to France and worked for the J.Art Ballet in Paris for three years. In 2000, she became choreographic assistant for Rui Horta and worked in Switzerland with Guilherme Botelho, Kylie Walters, and Gisela Rocha.
Nicolas Cantillon started his dancing training at the Conservatoire Marius Petipa in 1989. He worked for the J.Art Ballet in Paris for eight years. In 1999, Andy Degroat recruited him for Bob Wilson’s Magic Flute at the Opéra Bastille. He has worked in partnership with Guilherme Botelho for three years. In parallel, he has worked with Gisela Rocha, Kylie Walters and Marisa Von Stockert.
In 2000. Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon established Compagnie 7273
Compagnie 7273: http://www.cie7273.com
