GONFLES/Vehicles - EARTH

Creation 2020
Piece for 3 women 
Hongkong Clockenflap Festival / First part - November 2018

A performance for a young public because we are forever young.

The project, unlike any other, started from the desire to take a step aside with this music of AC/DC in particular. As a teenager, I didn't listen to this band, but rock music was a revelation in my adolescence, and it also brought the desire for dancing, a liberation at this moment of my life.

Today, while listening to AC/DC a little by chance, I understood that this music carried an energy that still called to me, that this music had played a founding role as a refuge but also as a source at this time of my life. I took the time to listen to it again, with its composition of rhythms, its melodic games, the use of silence and this way of "cutting the sound", a unique trait in AC/DC, which echoes choreographic processes of composition that I like, between movement and immobility. I have kept these very abrupt compositional dimensions in the choreography, characterized by abruptness and forms of sound collages that always touch and enchant me.

"No stop sign, no speed limit, no one will make me slow down... I'm on the highway to hell" (excerpt from Highway To Hell)
In these lyrics that summon hell, I saw mythology and origins, within this raspy rock raspy that releases energy without brutality, and in which Angus Young, the eternal schoolboy, is here to remind us of these beginning times of our existences.

When I learned that we would be invited to the CLOCKENFLAP Rock Festival in Hong Kong, I decided to prepare a piece for women using several songs that I selected and arranged with François Richomme. In answer to the excessiveness of the sound, I suggested working with our extra - ordinary inflatable structures designed for these women, echoing the roundness of the EARTH, but in black as a reference to mythology, to a dark underworld and to rock.

I didn’t wish to evoke anything in particular, nor did I have the desire to recall anything. I just suggested that these three women seize this musical energy in order to deploy themselves, letting their desires fully appear in their dance, approaching excess as men did on rock stages. This excess appears in the choice of gestures, invented attitudes, flung out signs, as well as in the qualities of chosen glances, supported by the images of body deformation brought about through the inflatable structures. I also treat space by demonizing it, and followed the music freely, using energy changes in order to reveal with this new body, the power of the dance: to sum it up I aimed for a form of celebration of music and dance in unison.

I took this composition as a real challenge with sound to inhabit it, to transcend it and -with these three women-, to give life to this singular choreographic form marked by recovered youth.

Didier THERON - Mars 2021