AU COEUR

— Creation 2021

Théâtre de la Ville - Les Abbesses, Paris

Born out of an unexpected encounter between a contemporary dancer and a folk dance group, Au coeur is as unique as the precious context in which it came to be created. Over the course of a long-term residency with the Lous Castellous artistic community, Dalila Belaza wanted “to investigate the state that leads to the sudden emergence of dance, in whatever form that takes,” by working on what bodies experience in order to discover what potentially connects them. And so a group of men and women in traditional dress (clogs, scarves, dresses, and headwear) and a supportive artist gradually ventured into new territory using the physical language and movement patterns of folk dance from the Aveyron region, in addition to the rhythm of their dance steps. Belaza encouraged them to delve into the gaps by halting their movements, slowing down, and even suspending their dancing. She asked them to draw on the deeply-rooted memory of the ancestral practice that had been passed down to them. Through this unusual collective experience they created a shared language that served as the foundation for a hybrid creation, lying somewhere between figuration and abstraction, past and present, the intimate and the universal.