DANCE – Paco Dècina at Théâtre de la Ville
Neapolitan of origin, Paco Dècina continues his Mediterranean quest full of suggestions, gestures put together. With Mare Rubato, he develops, in a steel-grey atmosphere, a meditation for seven dancers dressed in the colors of the ground: saffron, ochre, scorched earth
It begins as a memory of tragedy, a very distant memory of which there are only slow gestures of imploration, curvatures, worn weighing their weights of flesh. Sometimes a mirror manipulated under the sun creates shadows of missing faces on the wall. We are in the elegy, in the fresh waters of a music mixing Aramaic songs with the flow of an imaginary and hard sea.
Then come the unfriendly squeaks bending the movement under their law, imposing momentum on it, a fleeting speed. Under the blue sky, a young girl plays the violin, another dance softly. That's the end of it.
A hypnotic piece made of beauty and symbols, Mare rubato is a somewhat painful work of appeasement. We can blame him for an "interlude" side, that moment of beautiful images broadcast between two shows in the ORTF of our childhood.
We can also get caught up in the choreographer's vision of our own inner universe. Then everything is well and truly.
In contemporary dance, the art of emotions, the choreographer's work is often a challenge. He must, while maintaining the cohesion of his design, propose to the viewer a universe where the viewer can record his own history.
Already, from this point of view, Mare rubato de Paco Dècina is a splendid success. A quest for what the modern world is stealing from us and that only an archaeology of inner life can give us back. Mare Rubato uses the dancers' bodies as vectors of emotion.
White desert sometimes tarnished, stained by the soot of human actions, the décor, superb sobriety, comes alive under the lights.
Dance and painting are both "feeling" and meet here. Quality of movements, lighting, beauty of the costumes give the show an evocative magic of great strength.
We think of the buto, the prehistoric frescoes, the Indian temples... Even absent, the sea offers all the richness of its symbolism.
The "stolen sea" is present in the soundtrack that blows, rolls the waves and pebbles.
Sometimes very mineral, the music is humanized from the inflections of Esther Lamandier's voice.
Full of the grave sweetness of gestures that reflect a suffering that stretches to infinity by dint of being internalized, Mare rubato ends on the blue luminosity of hope.
A cathartic spectacle that is love in memory and reminds us that dignity and human beings can coexist.
Dance is also an art of the eye
A Neapolitan of origin, Paco Dècina chose France to develop a sensitive and aesthetic choreographic work (in the best sense of the word). Tempi Morti, Ombre in Rosso Antico, then Vestigia di un corpo font successively know the delicately laid writing of Paco Dècina, imbued with pictorial references, of Southern music, where a latent desire emerges under the bark of the images. With Paco Dècina, we can safely say that dance, if it is an art of the body, is also an art of the eye. And in times, perhaps of too high visibility, the choreographer chooses the refreshing darkness, he explores the darkroom of being and, without obscuring anything of his subject, he uncovers folds of memory, undresses the imprint of death to touch areas of sensation deep in consciousness. This singular work in black awakens from "small wounds of the invisible", giving the strange consistency of a "suspended time, where the void seems to take the place of distant bodies whose history is lost" .
The rumour collected of the bodies takes the place of lyricism
For Paco Dècina, this is an iconography of the possible. The aesthetic that wins the dance then ceases to be an effect to assert itself as an artistic vision. With Ciro Esposito fu Vicenzo, Paco Dècina succeeds arguably one of the most beautiful choreographies of recent years, composing a kind of opera where the collected rumor of bodies takes the place of lyricism, where the nudity carried like an offering is printed as an indelible act of human warmth.
In the interweaving of vision and movement, Paco Dècina excels at painting the lament of buried bodies. It weaves the memory of unsuspected times that ensure in every form of presence in the world. With a restraint in all shades, he saw the dance as an active recollection of the slow secretions of existence.
Serenity and Detachment, Mare Rubato
Paco Dècina, in essence, undertakes with Mare Rubato the purity of a light, colors and myths that have bathed her childhood. Does the Mediterranean call its deluge of garish passions, angry gods, tragic pain? Paco Dècina contrasts the contemplative sweetness of the horizons melted with blue, the rustle of the silences kneaded with eternity, the deaf preponderance of twilight.
A show that exudes serenity and detachment, Mare Rubato evokes for the choreographer a sea stolen, torn, lost. Nostalgia for a founding civilization, now reduced to eccentric folklore, a shore at the abandonment of sunken myths. Distant idea of a sea that should be salted to "the sweat of all those who have sunk there", ancient splendor fallen into ruins and ashes. For a moment, Paco Dècina summons the shadow of Tragedy, a wandering, lost figure of a statufied past. Brief initial appearance, as soon as returned behind the scenes: there will be no resurgence or invocation of a worn pathos, enslaved to the "shows of reality, deviated from its cathartic function" in Mare Rubato.
To shudder a space with presences, floating of beings
Hieratic painting of an already shipwrecked shipwreck, free from the violence that seizes the bodies in an emergency. Here the pain has not taken hold on the flesh, but circulates, invisible as a rumor whose secret must be kept. Escaping the dramatic genres of masculine and feminine (a typological on which dance usually bases its rhetoric), Paco Dècina is content to shudder a space with presences, floating of beings that would be the ultimate link between earth and sky, absorbed in the material of a moving composition.
Is it still possible to dance with the weight of the world?
A woman's solo in red-orange sari exudes the spectacle of a dream of the Orient, a promise of a dawn that would rise over landscapes that have begun again, again fertilized, while ochre or brown tones evoke the infinitude of the desert elsewhere. To music by Schnittke, former heroes lay useless grey vareous on the ground, while a mineral dance comes to celebrate their renunciation. Is it still possible to dance with the weight of the world? Atlas no longer has the strength to keep the globe on hold. In a short solo, Paco Dècina wields with great grace and humor a weight of measure before simply getting rid of it. There is in this brief ceremony of deposition the sign that contemporary suffering must be carried with dignity, that it must not stifle the emergence of the gesture, that it is necessary to learn to lighten it so that deaf, from the infinite memory of bodies, a kind of virginity in which a light could once again be indcribed.
In this sense, Mare Rubato is an initiation show. For Paco Dècina, dance invites a counterspace: it is the stuff that is both humble and sumptuous that preserves the inviolability of a mystery that would have survived the sinking of the Mediterranean space, a childhood space, a remnant of materials.
By promoting creation, contemporary dance, whose richness of languages is no longer to be demonstrated, has the distinction of welcoming a number of self-taught approaches. Among these, Paco Dècina's work has been asserting itself for some time. Originally from Neapolitan, the choreographer has been based in Paris for ten years now. Early light, colorful, figurative pieces simply marked his disposition to engage in a work on time, memory, feeling. The playful trace of the first steps towards choreography will lead Paco Dècina to the fall. That of " Charybde and Sylla", a piece of rupture in the way of approaching work and also a piece of emergence from which come as skeins isolated and repeated each of the following shows.
It will first be a remnant of a remarkable body-work that introduces into the choreographer's journey the idea of the fragmentation of the body, following in the footsteps of the collective unconscious. Then we witness, with the sequence of his last three shows "Ciro Esposito fu Vincenzo", "Fessure" and his latest creation that has just been presented in Châteauvallon, after a residency at the TNDI (National Theatre of Dance and Image), "Mare rubato", to develop a search for a writing.
The dancers of the company are here the special interpreters of the "subtle realities" that animate the choreographer's pieces and are all musings straight out of the mental image at the origin of each of Paco Dècina's choreographies. There come the bodies to be written as materials of the intimate. They also seem to act as the sensitive film that leads and falls within a research on the perception more and more distant from theatricality and carried exclusively by gesture and posture. In "Fessure", the bodies are released by snippets of gestures. Nestled in light, their development relates to the flesh. It occurs in the slowness of a fluid and continuous movement. As he walks through the pulp of the sensitive, Paco Dècina's choreographic work stops on the cracks, follows the lines, these "small wounds of the invisible" where the bodies disintegrate.
"Mare rubato" bathes in the vibrations of white and sound elements that evoke the minerality and density of water. With this latest creation Paco Dècina sums up all of his aesthetic concerns by tracing most of his pieces. The notion of erasure leads the choreographer towards abstraction, but something of his vision is relentlessly reconstructed. In the silence of gestures or posture, the part of the intimate remains watertight, is played in a closed universe. Frame, colour, pattern, everything here tends to the pictorial work, to the birth and modification of paintings. It seems that the choreographer's eye stalks in the vibration of the elements, through attention, contemplation, something of the soul or a universal matter.
Chateauvallon
The Italian choreographer Paco Dècina expresses, through the density of slowness and movement, a deep inner disorder in a beautiful show.
In the bare, open space, a dancer standing, motionless, another in a long white tunic, on the floor, a man in soft horizontal. From the beginning, a feeling of noble balance, of plastic silence that, little by little, with precision, comes alive, in expressive slowness of movements, in offering of arms.
This harmony will develop into Mediterranean evocations, Italy, Greece, the East of this sea, in this show by Paco Dècina whose scenic beauty is always linked to the development of dance and to a precise and refined technique.
The slowness, dancers developing, in a flexible balance, figures that suddenly of a sharp, nervous turn, throw them in an expression of the whole body, in jumps, in encounters, in groups. With, crossing the scene of the elks, in the race, breaking up ...
Legends live on stage, invocations of outstretched hands, calls. "Wears" directly lift the dancer, prolonged, vertical, horizontal, in Force Émouvant, deep, who are involved in the general movement, in the play of the figures of new slow motion, three-four dancers.
And always this Elevation, this clarity that gives the bodies all their pride, in a choreographic composition giving all the parts this plastic of the Italian artists of Piero della Francesca.
Paco thus expresses a mystery, something beyond the visible, an impression of the sea, of cloud water, underlined by the soundtrack to the sounds of waves, waves and winds.
It is, in the first part, a kind of research, life and pain, which then leads to an expression of death, in a dance in black clothes, of extreme density, where by gravity, the slowness of the figures, allusions to the cross, the choreographer speaks sobriety, inner tension. Sobriety also of the costumes, associated with the gesture, the use of space.
to the expression of death follows, luminous, the last dance in white clothes, also slow, but more imposing, more assertive.
Very good dancers including the choreographer, in this dance where slowness and vivid recovery are given by the mastery of bodies and plastic.
Lighting also plays a big role in this "Mare rubato" from softness to clarity and the low shadows of the end.
Mare rubato" : Stolen sea, sea gone, leaving the anguish of time to come, the thought of life over time, in the duration and inner drama and with a feeling of immensity.
A beautiful achievement of this Italian choreographer who lives and works in France and made this creation in Residence in Châteauvallon.