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Huà, un homme vivant face à un homme mort

Articles

"The metamorphosis of bodies which confirms our existence" Roland Duclos, La Montagne, March 31, 2000

The human body facing resurrection, its transfiguration : Paco Dècina explores the paradoxes of being and non-being in its most radical metamorphoses, while allowing the spectator the freedom to see whatever he wishes. Dance for him is neither unconditional nor uncompromising.

From intent to perception a whole world exists, even several. From pretext to actual reaction, emotion, between what the choreographer says and what the audience sees, the space and its imagination is unlimited, giving us fertile expanses in which dreams are born, where visionary thoughts mingle. This extravagant space, filled with kaleidoscopic, whirling movement, comes into an existence chosen by its creator.

But it is this very ability as a creator to extend the possibilities in this piece to infinity that the dimension of Huà, a living man facing a dead man, escapes even the creative will of Paco Dècina. Yet it still adheres to his premise : exploring the permanence of vital energy as well as the metamorphosis of the being. The dancer insists that changes in his form do not affect the continuity of his reality.

The language of the body is thus infinite, but only if it liberates us from symbol and didacticism. Too many limitations shut off the senses, too much writing kills the word, and the word only reflects the successive states of transmutation in the process. Paco Dècina chooses obstinately not to show, to show off. His work stands without any pretension regarding our place in the world. He does not pretend to override the intangible, nor to define what cannot be defined. The concept of “immaterialism” is a source of life, of inspiration. Huà is a dialogue between death and transfiguration, escape and resurrection, and does not seek to give a meaning to our existence.

Dècina explains nothing, he is not a formalist. However his "codes" are universal, reaching us with full and global intelligence only through the radical independence of tone which is its tenor. The dancing is continuous, without a break, a calligraphic design for six dancers who seem possessed by this curious syntax, repeating and paradoxically refreshing itself, sustained by the exceptional sound score of Olivier Renouf and Christian Calon. The piece is a continuous loop, expanding ever wider until the final, unexpected antagonism between the couples.

Roland Duclos
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"Huà" E.D., La Terrasse, October 2002

"Huà, a man living in front of a dead man" , is the title in the form of an explicit painting of which Paco Dècina traces the features. Between these two anchors, he explores the register of human metamorphoses.

In the image of the Chinese language, the choreographer creates a choreographic shortcut between the pictogram and the ideogram. The form of this dance and its elaboration have an action so to speak magnetic, which reveals another way of thinking, another way of apprehending the world of the sensitive. Paco Dècina's writing slides towards its most inhabited and inspired surroundings, the dancer's body is this revelator that by interpreting the phases of the choreography becomes the medium of an immediate experience. It is also these constant metamorphoses that place the body at the heart of a network, that of the possible. Figurations, disfigurements, successive transfigurations of the body's states lead on a new soundtrack, towards the idea of the duo and towards the image of the couple.

E.D.
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