Dystopian suburbs of teenage dreams and nightmares. A group of girls meet. They dream of the future and share both individual and collective memories, oscillating between boredom and panic in the highly-planned architecture of their environment. Trapped amongst the remains of an urban nightmare built on earnest but misguided community housing projects, they wonder: Are there still possibilities waiting at The End of the Road? Cécile Bally’s social critique uses Sitcom-strategies to examine visions of radical change at the peripheries of urban life and transports the audience into an imaginary space at the borders of the city.

Cécile Bally is a Berlin-based choreographer and performer who graduated in dance and choreography at HZT Berlin, UDK. She previously studied Economics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Pantheon Sorbonne University in France. Her artistic work creates connections between these backgrounds and interrogates, with humour, the place of rationality and magical realism in performance. Cécile Bally roots her work in the science-fiction genre with an eye on social criticism, and therefore studies entitites (vampires, supermarkets), triggering dreams, and nightmares both utopian and dystopian.
cecilebally.com

A GROUP OF TEENAGE GIRLS MEET. Sitting on a bench, they discuss their personal and collective troubles, share memories and dream of what they could become. Together they search for strategies to deal with their environment, exploring the possibilities at the end of the road.

In this work, Cécile Bally explores the edge of the city, the periphery, where civilization as we know it ends and the imaginary begins. Throughout time these spaces have been invested with many utopian projections and dreams of radical change. Social and architectural visionaries have made it into a testing ground for the society of the future. When built and lived in, however, these utopian experiments often turn out to be nightmares, dystopian places that connect to a feeling of angst and disillusion, rather than creating the possibility for an ideal community.

Different buildings from different peripheries perform as the background for this piece:

LES ÉSPACES D’ABRAXAS (1982), built by Spanish architecht Ricardo Bo ll, is the kind of post-modern utopian housing project erected to solve a housing crisis in the east of Paris. It hosts 600 living units, spread out over three buildings. Inspired by the Greek Odeon and the Roman Amphitheater, this place was designed to be centered around itself in an attempt to decentralize the Parisian metropolis. Its purpose failed. Due to its futuristic atmosphere the building has been the scene for dystopian science ction lms, such as Brazil (1984) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2015).

WBS 70 OR WOHNUNGSBAUSERIE 70, is a speci c type of Plattenbau, a construction method that makes use of large prefabricated concrete slabs. The technique enabled the German Democaric Republic (GDR) to develop whole new areas very fast. Throughout the 1970s, WBS 70 buildings rose up all over Berlin. One of the prime examples – ‘die Platte aller Platten’ – can be found on Roederplatz. In the same place, there is a series of another type of Plattenbau (WBS/QP 71-R) adorned by big rainbows.

LES DAMIERS (1976), built by Jacques Binoux and Michel Folliasson in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris that became a major business district over the last years. It comprises 640 apartments divided in four buildings. Twelve years ago, the inhabitants of Les Damiers learned that the buildings would be demolished and replaced by two gigantic towers, the Hermitage Plaza, which should host of ces, high end appartments and a Hotel. The habitants of Les Damiers have been evicted but due to a lack of funding, the construction of the towers hasn’t started yet.

LES ARCADES DU LAC (1981), built by Ricardo Boll, is an ensemble of appartement buildings located 25km west of Paris. Due to its close proximity to Versailles, but also due to the immensity of the building, the Arcades are also de ned as “Versailles for the people”. Constructed as a pedestrian area, the site is suprisingly empty as all blocks are connected through an underground parking system which makes it uncessary to pass through the outside to go home.

[Source: play bill & sophiensaele.com]

TFB Nr. 1426