Mette Ingvartsen / Will Guthrie All Around

For a number of years the Danish choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen, a regular guest at the Festival d’Automne, and the Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie have been following each other’s work and collaborating remotely. Here, in Paris, they will be performing onstage together for the very first time

Members of the audience encircle a stage space taken up by a drum-kit, a moving light and the bodies of the performers. Through the use of minimal, repetitive vocabulary, the two artists embark upon a duo which brings together their different disciplines and fuses the various shapes. Rotations and gyrations, rhythm and speed, clarity and and obscurity become the main components of a performance which culminates in an ecstatic form of intensity, bordering on trance. Conceived for a variety of playing spaces and contexts, this short piece is presented here in the Palais de la Découverte’s rotunda, giving audiences the opportunity to gradually see this space in a new light as the different gestures and cadences unfold. The mosaic floor, the silhouettes of the audience members, and the dizzyingly high ceiling appear and disappear, seemingly caught up in the same collective movement.