François Chaignaud / Akaji Maro GOLD SHOWER
[Dance]The encounter between the pioneer of butoh and one of the most unique choreographers of the French dance scene promises to be both exquisite and explosive in equal measure. In a sublime and perverse parade, in which both epicenity and excess reign supreme, dance becomes ritual, and the flesh a form of revolt.
Akaji Maro, a dancer of emptiness and the grotesque, succeeds, with François Chaignaud, a performer and singer of multiple talents, in bringing about a common metamorphosis which transcends the seemingly insurmountable barriers of body, age, language, and tradition. In this shared dance, they find the means of confronting their different artistic forms and sensitivities, and of continually reinventing them, providing the structure for interplay between influences and transmissions which throw into disarray, irrevocably, both gender and the story. In François Chaignaud, Akaji Maro sees “eternity in the instant, the genealogy of vice and immortality, the eroticism of the ebb and flow of blood”. A flesh and blood in rebellion from which he proceeds, a pagan-like priest, to the crowning. The dance that they invent together stems from the ritualistic. Bodies come into contact and penetrate each other, mixing both voice and bodily fluid. Their two bodies, movingly interdependently within the rhythmic unity, alternate between weak and strong, and become the living demonstration of a vital strength, which is proportional – or disproportional – to their extravagance. Their initiatory dance amounts to bodily play in its purest form, in which idiocy and perversion dominate, and in which the present of the onstage experience also enables us to catch a glimpse of humanity. In this incandescent GOLDEN SHOWER, the image of which is not entirely dissimilar to Danaë’s progenitor golden rain, the urophilia fetish and golden powder of the kimpun-show, the burlesque cabaret act initiated by Akaji Maro, seriousness morphs into frivolity and artifice reinvents bodies.
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Estimated running time: 1h
