meurtres d’intérieur

NOVO
#7 (biweekly review): March 2010, pages 50 and 51
TOMEO VERGES: SENSATIONIST DANCE
By Caroline Châtelet

[...] in Toméo Vergès's work, the body's presence is pregnant in the most physical sense of the word. Dance doesn't necessarily translate into body, but Toméo Vergès has chosen to explore the possibilities of the latter. His pieces are not ethereal, nor do his dancers have perfect physiques. Rather, their earthy and very real bodies invest the stage with a powerfully organic form of dance. The company's pieces have an effect between pleasure and discomfort, grabbing you by the throat and leaving an indelible mark on your memory.

PRIVATE REJOICING...
Is the persistent emotion we receive from the company's latest piece, Meurtres d'Intérieur. The work unfolds on a minimalist set devoid of props and is built around three female solos. Toméo Vergès explains: "I wanted to explore contemporary femaleness. This is my first experience working exclusively with women. I was joined in the endeavor by Sandrine Maisonneuve, Sandrine Buring and Antje Schur, the last two of whom I had never worked with before." The team drew on their collective imagination as well as the personality of each dancer. Each solo is given a very personal slant by "three distinctive women, each with her own take on the group's issues." This seems self-evident, in fact, given how organic each solo feels. Each dancer starts out with a given situation and explores all its possibilities: for Antje Schur, this involves an attempt at self-definition through "I am...", for Sandrine Maisonneuve, it means repeating the same series of movements 130 times and, for Sandrine Buring, it starts with undressing. Inasmuch as each woman works from personal inspiration, her purpose is "to fight, to touch on our inner struggles and put them in plain view. But the dancers are not weighed down by constraints. They express pleasure too, and these two elements create friction." This friction is directed straight at the audience through the dancers' "engaging, frontal gaze." " Each woman reveals herself" without putting herself on display. Toméo Vergès elaborates by saying "what they show us is a landscape," thereby questioning our place in the world. And behind the apparent austerity of the stage design, each of their movements speaks worlds—somewhere between malice, tumult, insolence and a child's teasing. Movements are amplified by paper robes "like empty pages of a book devoid of clothing's usual social connotations" in which each writes the story of her own femaleness. Folds, rustling and other intimate movements leave their marks on the dresses, recalling once again that, despite being the battlegrounds of universal obsession or struggle, each comes with her own material.

FOCUS ON ACTION
Like Toméo Vergès' previous works, Meurtres d'Intérieur is powerfully physical, yet it represents a turning point in the company's history. As Vergès explains: "I had always dealt with the coupling of dance and theater, notably in my work with Maguy Marin on May B, so continuing in that vein would have been natural for me. But in my last few pieces, I've been less interested in theatricality." That is why the choreograph doesn't use "visual aids" in Meurtres d'Intérieur: "It's very subjective, but I sometimes used objects to stand in for a thing, an entity, or people on the stage." In Meurtres d'Intérieur, Vergès rules out the use of such objects in order to better study movement: "To see what happens when you don't have a parachute. To try to hear, to listen for, the sound of want, the primal cry. To go there despite the risks is a challenge, but the anxiety it produces is a source of creativity." It is also a conscious decision, motivated by necessity, to put himself in danger's way.