Myriam Gourfink Structure Souffle

Myriam Gourfink creates choreographic works of a radical nature, in the sense that they are concerned with the very root of movement itself. Using breath as the primary structure of the moving body, her choreography, inspired by ballroom dances and put to music by Kasper T. Toeplitz, brings to the stage the expansion of perception, the exploration of contact and the emptiness between bodies – an emptiness which forms and deforms.

In the Sainte-Chapelle at the Château de Vincennes, at the centre of the circle made by the spectators, eight dancers are attached to each other in an intriguing way. Whether it be a head entering into a stomach, or fingernails on the palm of a hand, the vocabulary of ballroom dances put through the filter of Laban notation and Myriam Gourfink’s writing gives rise to unexpected figures. An extension of the breath, the counterbalancing bodies form an elastic structure whose two lobes contract, dilate and split. In resonance with the choreographic continuum and the open score, Kaspar T.Toeplitz, a frequenter composer for the company, sculpts the instability of electronic frequencies in real-time. Following on from Glissements, presented at the Festival d’Automne in 2019 for Les Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie, the choreographer creates in situ this piece which makes the visible invisible: the breath that links us all.