2023-11-21 06:58:14
Time seems to have no hold on Carolyn Carlson. She, who celebrated her 80th birthday in March, is more active than ever. At the beginning of July, the resumption of Signs, one of his flagship ballets, sold out the Opéra Bastille. In mid-October, at the Seine Musicale, she created a surprise in Poetry in motiona performance around the songs of Arthur H. Bringing your repertoire to life and never stopping innovating, the two gestures are at work in Crossroads to synchronicity, who revisits his show Synchronicity, dated 2012.
This (re)creation is inspired by the notion of synchronicity as defined by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung: when two events a priori unrelated to each other collide and make sense. Like a clock that stops at the moment of the death of a loved one or a chance encounter with a long-lost person that we were just thinking about.
To evoke what some see as signs of destiny, Carolyn Carlson imagines fluid crossovers where silhouettes brush past each other without seeing each other, meet, love or abandon each other.
The power of the American imagination
Around the six dancers who twirl with passion and sensuality, the stage system is reduced to the essentials: doors which move like so many possible bifurcations in a life journey; chairs that certain “characters” don’t know where to put, as if they couldn’t find their place; a screen like a window into the unconscious, where beings fall in slow motion, where shadows appear and disappear like ghosts.
In this patchwork of moods that are by turns melancholic, disturbing or joyful, the choreographer summons the power of the American imagination: the sound of a steam train, a brazier near which we warm up, a metal bathtub, guns … The staging is sometimes reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper or the aesthetics of film noir from the 1950s.
An imaginary journey through the America of yesteryear, like a return to the roots for the choreographer born in California, where the soundtrack occupies a crucial place: Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, three monuments of music “made in USA” rub shoulders with young talents like Alela Diane and her delicate folk ballad Foreign Tongueor sublime classical pieces like this funeral song by Henry Purcell which offers the dancer Céline Maufroid a perfect moment of grace.
#Carolyn #Carlsons #postcard #America