laurentchetouane.com

What happens if several dancers simultaneously think of their own performance as a solo and not as part of a group piece? The choreographer Laurent Chétouane, light designer Jan Maertens and the dancers and choreographers Ioannis Mandafounis, Mikael Marklund and Roberta Mosca join forces and focus on the themes of co-existence and being together. They develop solos that are inhabiting the same space and deal with the multi-faceted conceptual field of encounter, interlocking, overlap, and collision. What happens when each of the three dancers locates his presence in the totality of space and not just a part of it?
In “SOLI” the term co-existence receives a striking currency in the face of territorial claims and mechanisms of demarcation. The staging of the Belgian light designer Jan Maertens and the sounds the dancers make when moving work as the rhythmic structure of “SOLI”, which Laurent Chétouane directs without any music.

“Co-existence is often considered to be the organised juxtaposition of areas separated from one other by frontiers, borders, real or virtual limits which provide a space for existence outside ‘mine’. We talk about tolerance, respect for the differentiated ‘other’.
But this vision of the division of the world no longer seems to correspond to the geopolitical realities. Globalisation unifies all space as a whole in which everything starts to flow without restriction: goods, cultures, people.
Frontiers have become obsolete and the current tendency to want to (re-)assert them – as the news shows – is ‘schizophrenic’ because contrary to the fluidifying of the world caused by globalisation itself.”
Laurent Chétouane