DD DORVILLIER
human future dance corps

Dance is the archeologist of dance, digging into dance, by dancing to the bone.

 

Language and orality, and a constant flooding of internal images, haunt my current dancing. There's a need to use the body in an immediate way, and to move and sense the lightness and power of the mutual gaze of audience and performer, in this case me. There's a need to use the voice, relying on the complicity between movement and utterance. And there's a need to situate dancing in the present, to cultivate its delicate capacity to create space for listening and observing differently.

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This new solo created and performed by choreographer DD Dorvillier is structured by four successive dance scores. Emerging from dreams and memories, the scores draw from work at a handful of little-known archeological sites in France during the making of Landscape Stories 

(a recent site-based quartet).

 

Dance is often spoken of as ephemeral, with persistent disappearance as its basic condition. But dance can also make invisible things appear. As in archeology, we suspect something there, we go digging to reveal it. A dance buried in the memory, or in a dream, appears only after dancing it again. It appears, we dance it, send it back through the memory of the beholder, and time bends.

 

The performance takes place in two parts. In the first, Dorvillier performs the series of dance scores, accompanied by Sébastien Roux's sound score. This sound score, and the sounds of Dorvillier's movements and her words (as well as the ambient sounds of the space, lights and audience) are recorded. Then, at the onset of the second part, as Dorvillier begins the dance again, this recording is played back, becoming the sound score for the rest of the dance.

 

Thus, the dancer dances, digging through the series of scores again. The recorded sound becomes a sonic ghost, conjugating the present with the immediate past, as she moves towards the future.

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Some press on Dance is the archeologist, or an idol in the bone.​

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« As soon as DD Dorvillier walked onto the stage ... you knew you were in the presence of somebody long immersed in her craft, capable of doing a lot with a little. Through the simple act of standing still and surveying the audience, she seemed to light a spark in the bare warehouse space, her enigmatic gaze bristling with minute shifts of awareness. It was the subtlest invitation into a dance made with the lightest touch. »

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Siobhan Burke for the New York Times, October 18, 2024

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« DD Dorvillier embarks on a quest for personal, artistic, but also social, societal, political, and spiritual pasts and traditions, to feel their echo

in the present and draw a vision of the future from it. With this humble, tender, cautious, yet concrete and intelligent work, integrated into her series Untitled Landscapes, DD Dorvillier also advocates awareness of these forces and processes. Because this awareness enables freedom, creativity, and the assumption of responsibility, thus laying the foundations for shaping oneself, futures, and art in this sense. »

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Rando Hannemann for the Online Merker, July 2024