Gwenaël Morin

Tenderness welcomes as many definitions as there are personal experiences of it, and in this piece two performer-choreographers and a performer-musician embark us upon a collective, experimental form of research into this anti-authoritarian motto. It leads to a transformation of ways of being together, but also of the different forms that representation can take.

Ruth Childs, the Anglo-American choreographer and Cécile Bouffard, the French visual artist turn their attention to our quirks, bodily memory and the remnants of folklore in the contemporary world. Part installation, part performance for three dancers, Such a Devoted Bunch explores the mechanics of devotion and obsession via movement and objects.

The Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon brings together two repetitive movement choreographers: Lucinda Childs, with Dance, an iconic work first performed in 1979, and Alessandro Sciarroni, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, who presents HØPE, a new work inspired by a dance found in cowboy culture. 

A vast configuration consisting of fifty upright pianos forming a large circle, with an ensemble of twenty-five musicians sat at them, their backs to the audience, who are sat in the middle, 11 000 Saiten (11 000 Strings) is a fresco of a fascinating kind. Georg Friedrich Haas invites us to become enthralled, enveloped by a palette of infinite variety, like a sound-based mirror held up to the entire universe.

How can we set in motion the bodies of around one hundred dancers? In order to rise up to this extraordinary, transmission-based challenge, Boris Charmatz conjures up a swarm-like choreography of physiques and voices. Together, they traverse key moments of his work.

In GLA55, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns to American minimalist music and explores, for the first time, the work of Philip Glass. Set to four of the composer’s early works, performed live by the ICTUS ensemble, six dancers push abstraction to the frontier with trance.

The architect and visual artist Feda Wardak plunges deep into the depths of Afghan struggles by means of an installation of a spectacular natures, inhabited by the dancers of choreographer Saïdo Lehlouh.