conception & artistic direction Anne Collod
In the mid-nineteen 40's in California, the choreographer Anna Halprin began to develop one of the most radical and fecund artistic adventures of the XXth century.
Using improvisation, "tasks" (an innovative concept which captures the gestures of daily life into the field of dance), collaboration with artists of numerous disciplines, work in nature, involvement in major political and social conflicts, work with nudity, on the relationships between communities and, later, illness and death, all her aesthetical approaches and her working processes laid the foundations of Performance, and opened a vast field of experimentations for American post-modern dance and numerous artists.
Anne Collod, who went to San Francisco to work with this extraordinary woman, In 2008, Anne Collod invited a group of major European and American choreographers / performers to re-open the construction site of Parades & Changes, Halprin's seminal work of the 60's. In dialogue with Anna Halprin and composer Morton Subotnick, they re-enact and update the numerous “scores” of this work, and introduce for the first time since the 60's a complete re-interpretation of the piece which was banned for twenty-five years in the United States because of the use of nudity.
Putting into play daily actions altered by very simple instructions, performers cross the theatre with a series of "parades" which invite imaginary of the collective and utopias of "being together". Sound bodies, trips of objects, distended temporalities, raw materials and numerous sensorial states : This « ceremony of trust » is a magnificent unveiling which lays bare the process, the place, the action and the performer.
After the critically and publically acclaimed 2008's version (which toured in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, England, Greece, USA) parades & changes, replay in expansion proposes a complete version of all the "scores" of the sixties and pushes the potentialities of this major play by inviting four performers coming from the circus to join the dancers. Their qualities and their specific imagination are in the heart of the reactivation of new parades, especially a Parade of Construction, symbolic of the piece by its deployment in the third dimension:
Taking support on the elements of the venue, in particular on a tower serving to settle the lightings, the circus artists leave the scene to gain the heights and take us in an air crossing which makes us feel the space and the scales of the place, by their liveliness and their capacity to let go.
The lightning also participates in the expansion of the parades and orchestrates a ballet of projectors which, by playing with the shadows and the contrasts, reveals the multiple dimensions and the hidden resources of the theatre.
With the help of leading air-artists, this audacious casting - reviving the original transdisciplinarity of the work - develops in a remarkable homogeneity the irreducible modernity of the piece.
Involving for the first time the whole of the historic "scores" developed by Halprin and the new "scores" of 2008, replay in expansion is the opportunity of a re-foundation of the 60's and 2000's versions in an original shape.