The passage of the Art-Danse festival in Beaune with Summa Iru, the work of Paco Dècina, will have left the best image of contemporary dance.
A little more than an hour of dancing is not much! But offered with such density, such full intensity and so much emotion, this moment has eluded time, taking proportions beyond human contingencies. Even the rhythm, sometimes sustained and the action, with enchanting speeds or uninterrupted sequences, seemed to drive away gravity and effort.
Intelligent Show
Paco Dècina, a Neapolitan painter at heart, is one of the greatest contemporary choreographers. With Summa Iru, he flirts with perfection for which the four dancers Valeria Apicella, Silvia Bidegain, Jorge Crudo and Paolo Ridelli perform prodigies.
Between darkness and bluish light, between slow motion and sequences with exceptional accuracy, the choreography of two or four is a hymn to plastic beauty. The gestures sliding towards each other, simple, all the more beautiful because they are simple, evolve to original music by Christian Calon and Olivier Renouf or additional music by Sheila Dhar, gruppo di improvisazione nuova consonanza, Chaurasia.
A good aesthetic presides over the various paintings when imbalances create movement, when bodies wind or marry on the ground, full of nobility, vulgarity not part of the author's vocabulary. The sequences are varied and pure, sensual. And all this exudes intelligence,
The passage of the Art-Danse festival in Beaune with Summa Iru, the work of Paco Dècina, will have left the best image of contemporary dance.
The photo of a resting buffalo is an apt illustration for this piece. An animal at rest, its serene presence – things that inspire this Neapolitan artist, who is a past master in the art of choreographing the immobile. Interested in Chinese medicine and Oriental thought for years, Paco Dècina has refined his approach over ten years, finding links between each organ and the cosmos, the permeability between the being and his universe. Dance is therefore not something which "belongs" to the dancer, rather he or she is the vehicle for the essence of the movement. "This research relates to a series of questions I have about the relationship of man to his life and his capacity to accept himself as he is. I discarded the idea of “performance” to focus more on dancing and its profound innocence".
the choreographer bends and unfolds a body that is both full and porous, whose gestural subtlety touches on the very essence of movement.
Visu, the Dieppe National Stage festival that addresses the link between the gaze and the body, opened on Thursday evening. Two unevenly-lasting dance pieces were presented: "Flamenco" (5 minutes), by and by Farid Berki, and "Summa Iru" (55 minutes) by Paco Dècina, a first.
"Summa Iru" means in Tamil, an Indian language, "stay quiet: there is nothing to do...! ". And each body ripples on stage as if it had let go of reality. He follows the music as he would follow the perpetual breath of the universe of Eastern religions. Inspiration... Bodies swell, flourish, expand, open. Expiry... Bodies pick up, curl up, in the fetal position. The movements follow each other without breaking, like a thread that would be unrolled,
" Not to talk about the relationship of bodies between them would be to forget the essentials. Four dancers. Two women. Two men. Couples touch each other, touch each other, caress each other, interlock, with infinite sweetness. The man walks in the footsteps of the woman, who touches the face and hands of the woman. The sensuality is pure, harmonious... an essential part of life,
"Summa Iru" gives the viewer a bit of harmony with the world he depicts.