What is the theme of “Pixel“?

Claire: “Pixel” was born after we met the hip hop choreographer Mourad Merzouki and created a first short performance for 11 amateurs dancers. We shared a really joyful and energetic moment and decided to create something bigger with professional dancers. What really became obvious to the three of us was that we were all excited by the notion of illusion: illusion through digital tools and illusion in hip hop moves. We want to make real and virtual merge, to blur perception and make “impossible” things appear from nowhere. And hip hop dancers are doing exactly the same with their bodies: arms moving as liquids or as robots, accelerations and slow motions… In both cases the relationships to time and space are modified, distorted.

Adrien: Pixel is a playful show where many art disciplines merge. Dancers evolve in a poetic and dreamy environment where the audience does not always know what is real or not.

“Pixel”, 2014, © Raoul Lemercier

You are often also co-produced with other performers and dancers. In the future, who do you want to work with?

At the moment we are working mainly on our own productions – at least for the next two years.

“Le mouvement de l’air”, Elastique, show, October 2015, © Adrien M / Claire B

Could you please talk a little bit about “Le mouvement de l’air“, scheduled for October this year?

Claire: It is a front show designed for three dancers in an immersive environment shaped by projected images. It is the biggest project we have ever worked on!
The performance matches seemingly impossible visions: images look alive while bodies fly, defying gravity. The acrobatic and digital choreography outlines a body language that involves a new relationship to time, space and the whole world. Beyond looking for technical achievement, what matters is the attempt at creating a motion dreamscape by way of images.
The theme is the imaginary of the air and everything related: weightlessness, verticality, suspension, sky, cloud, diffuse, fall, void, floor, support, momentum, illusion, unreal, dematerialization, lightness, heaviness, inside out, upside down, rocking, wind, breathing, surrendering, gravity, invisible, dream…

Adrien: We wish to remove images from screens, to turn them into landscapes, into playing partners, and to put them at the center of the space mapping.
The set is inhabited by a 3 face structure: two vertical panels of white gauze and a white dance floor are asymmetrically combined to create an immersive projection system. Thanks to this device many diverse realms can arise.

“Le mouvement de l’air”, Tornade, show, October 2015, © Adrien M / Claire B

Claire: On stage three performers can float around space. Driven by verticality they struggle between enthusiasm and anguish, between falling down and rising up. Their bodies define a new and unusual language that draws its inspiration from the ordinary but transposes it in a poetic way. This language plays with reality to explore a living kinetic art territory where bodies evolve between abstraction and emotion. It is a quest for a motion-driven onirism.
In addition to projected images, uplifting and suspension devices allow bodies to rise up in the air without any magical trick. The dancers work on their sense of weight and balance with the floor, they devise illusory aerial trajectories and juggle with space. The body motion transcend the possible to reach the impossible and the images’ immaterial realms.

Adrien: An important detail is that our shows are not grounded on a text. Their language is based on the combination of video images, bodies, space and sound.
Nowadays, digital technology has shaken up stage crafts so that we feel like explorers within new continents. We call “writing” the trace we leave on these territories. To us, it is about writing with the elements in a similar spirit to Land Art, it is playing with nature and its forces. However, here, fire, snow, sand, water, smoke and rocks are digital and virtual, and so the bearers of a newer animism. It is then a matter of organizing the forces of the digital nature and guiding its energies, to achieve a rhythmic work with the projected images drawing on the intentions at the very motion’s core.

“Cinématique”, Hexagone, show, 2010, © Raoul Lemercier

Please tell me what you are interested in now.

On the technical side we work with VR and AR set, we are very interested in the hololens device, and the combination of leap motion and oculus is very interesting also…
On the artistic side everything is secret but there are really great things to come. And as always we are very open to discover new esthetics fields and new medium.