How can we give form to the bond that unites two dancers?
Beyond fantasies and projections, how can we shape all that is deposited, transmitted, and circulates in space when bodies move together?
To explore this both intangible and intimate relationship, Michael Pomero and Marie Goudot drew from their own lived experience – as a couple and as performers; from their deep knowledge of their own bodies and each other’s, from their connections, their zones of tension, of vertigo, and from the many vocabularies they have traversed together over 28 years of choreographic life.
To produce an immersive and tangible experience of this bond, they chose to move blindly and to let a voice influence the creation of movement.
An external voice, a conspiratorial speech guiding their steps, their suspensions, shaping their impulses, steering their imagination.
Inspired by Vito Acconci’s performance Association Area, After Hannibal creates an open associative space, a terrain of projections where their bodies react, interact, and translate in their own way the impulses sparked and dispersed by language.
A double act of translation: of what words produce within and for the other – manifesting in a choreography on a tightrope, where words, images, and the movement they generate constantly reflect back on one another in a continuous feedback loop.
Eyes wide shut, their eyes closed, wide open to the inside, they give form to an image of attachment.
Turning a constraint into a layer of legibility of the bodies, After Hannibal seeks to make visible what usually remains unseen: the invention and spread of gestures in space; how two bodies synchronize, isolate, come into unison, slip, fall, rise – and dance, beyond appearances.
Collective creation by Christine De Smedt, Gilles Amalvi, Julien Monty, Michael Pomero, Marie Goudot
With Marie Goudot, Michael Pomero, Christine De Smedt, Gilles Amalvi
Artistic guidance, advice Julien Monty
Lighting Quentin Maes
Production Youngsters Asbl, Association Loge 22
Executive production Entropie Production
Coproduction CND, Les Brigittines, Charleroi Danse – Centre chorégraphique de Wallonie-Bruxelles.
Support La briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne for residency hosting. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.