Vertiginous refuge

In Nicole Mossoux’s and Patrick Bonté’s work, how do we distinguish the political from the intimate, dreams from reality and history from fiction?

It’s the capacity to reveal the correlation between their work and what I am myself, a being living at the start of the XXI century, that I appreciate in their performances. They create a universe where ellipses, laconism, and fleeting revelations allow us to glimpse both troubling and familiar experiences. The force of their approach is in the freedom it leaves the audience.  Our unconscious, stimulated by visions that are simultaneously archaic and refined, resonates.  Form never detracts from emotion; it accompanies it and its strangeness does not provoke anxiety. We feel everything somehow relates, to others, to the past, to time, to artists that came before, to our breath, sculpted by sound, light, and the shadow that obscures it.

Like the tranquil bird of inverted flight bird / Who nestles in the air of Apollinaire, we find refuge in these vertiginous sensations. The violence is mediated by the presence of the dancers, at once distant and grave, simple and precise: artistic statements in their own right.

 

^{Caroline Lamarche • 2011}