In a space saturated with emptiness and mystery, five bodies reveal the wounds of the invisible. The audience holds its breath, time is suspended. Shadow and light, gestures that break on the void for a swirling eight-camera.
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.
Paco Dècina confronts with this piece a stripped-down universe where light sculpts the space inhabited by the dancers. Everything happens in a kind of no man's land between fantasy and reality. In a world where nostalgia, dream and emotion appear through the gaps, the cracks of movement. A work full of poetry and restraint.
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Fessure develops and amplifies a singular work in the dark, which operates in the fault of the vision the update of buried gestures.
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The other night on the South Pole stage, Paco Dècina offered his "iconography of the possible" .
From Naples the Italian where he was born, Paco Dècina inherits a sensitive Latinity. Facades kneaded with antique and submerged in light, shady backyards, place of folding and palavers. Rural Italy with revered agrarian symbols, marks its work of a climate distantly ruminated, but claimed and yet so deliberately there. Paco Dècina, like Joseph Nadj, is one of those choreographers of exile who replaces childhood geographies with a mapping of bodies, which notes as the fragile and sure frame of an observatory of remembrance, unknown traces, discrete accidents, opportune inclinations, inscribed very particularly in the flesh. Paco Decina is not a nostalgic, far from it. More than memory so often failing and even sometimes obscene, he draws his lessons from a delicate archaism, from the ancient one, who relied on the model of bodies to probe the truth of beings. At home, the gaze does not explore the horizon but the inside. How do you make the way of origin? he seems to be questioning pieces after pieces. And this essential question makes him prefer the interstice, the crack, which reveals what would be revealed.
"Fessure" this principle is therefore fleshed out. Little light, a huge reserve of black creates the zone of oblivion and also emergence. There is, in this choreographer, an economy of the visible that takes the form of a very modesty and the opposite of anything that would impose on the body a state of physical demonstration. The precisely regulated but unseristed walk constantly restores this slow pace, desired for itself and for all that it imposes appropriately on movement and positions. From there comes, no doubt, this dark sensation of a physical operation remarkably accomplished in the approximation of a state of wakefulness or perhaps - and it is probably the strange gap that is constantly going through "Fessure" - death. From there also comes this rituality which determines, in short, carefully all circulation and encounters. The music brings to these choregies the right hint of modernity that is necessary, without dismantling in any way this sanctuary of the present that Paco Dècina conceived as a darkroom: for the eclipse or the revelation.
Since 1987, Paco Dècina, the Neapolitan of Paris, traces his choreographic destiny away from the media hype with meticulousness and fantasy. Because of his origins, he has been able to confront his creativity with the remnants, the past, the daily life between France and Italy, where the atmosphere of the south shines through and emerges. Beautiful or dark stories to the duos altiers, where the falls are ephemeral accidents: lightness saves and transports the bodies at every moment. Dream in an imaginary expanse, Dazzling with emptiness, "Fessure" is like a empty room inhabited by light, some small objects, like volcanic stones because they have more history and more passion in my eyes".
A clear vision with eyes closed, the dance sweeps the empty stage full of light. We are in a distant time: bodies awaken, sculptures all to their dreams, to their sleep. These small wounds of the invisible that reveal the continuous flow of our feelings, small cracks in suspended times where distant bodies lose their history behind the cracks...
"These cracks then are solos, duets, trios, small ensembles that, like waves, intertwine, overlap to tell us about a larger sea, an ocean hidden behind the walls of everyday life, the walls with a distracted eye."
Paco Decina reveals the bodies of the dormant history, frozen as in the lava of Mount Vesuvius. Awakening from a relaxed deluge, the choreography becomes carnal, the postures and motifs summoned to the eye are embodied in the flesh of his dance... respectful of a civilization dear to the Neapolitan. Memory, symbol, a dance in a grey sand flow that flows between the gaps of remembrance.
A huge and dark beach where every stain of color, every volume, every movement of the five dancers are arranged with the architectural rigor that characterizes the Neapolitan choreographer. The scene is inhabited.
Paco Dècina takes the time to install states, drawing around the bodies, the emptiness in conscientious goldsmith. It painlessly violates the narrow intimacy of feelings to give us to see as an offering what he calls these "little wounds of the invisible" . Always or almost out of step, refusing the idea of spectacular, he elaborates a gesture and a setting in space all felt, in the distant or distracted resurgence that is sometimes lent to the old memories.
Women's duets, man duos, women's trios, male and female duets follow one another with moments of grace, dazzling compositions.
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Fessure, carnal and poetic work close to the icon where the choreographer develops an increasingly virgin and stripped-down writing, tracing under the light and detail of the bodies a common reverie.
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