DD DORVILLIER
human future dance corps

In 2022 we worked at a new site, les Fontaines Salées in Saint-Père, a village in the Morvan Natural Park and Reserve. The change of place created a big shift in our working methods. I had insisted that we would not create a new production and that our meeting with the public on the last day of our residency there would be based on a simple sharing of our experiences visiting and dancing at the site. I wanted to have space for research without thinking about making something. The magnetism of the place obliged me to develop a performative form there.

Thus, we created and premiered a new film, a performance with an original sound installation, and a text that straddled the two projects, all in a span of 12 days in October 2022. This became Les yeux du menusier. The movie was built around a text of poetic fragments describing different aspects of the archeological site and its history, with a particular interest for the caretaker of the site, whose perspective (his eyes) brought intimacy and power to the experience of getting to know the place. The movie also talked about movement, about dance, presence and touch. The film was screened off-site, on an outdoor stage in a nearby village.

The performance happened on-site at Les Fontaines Salées. It was a looping dance, a quintet that lasted about 10 minutes. With each new iteration of the loop there was a changing of roles, until the five performers had played all five roles. Repeating the dance, like digging, accumulating new layers of sensation and experience. (In Landscape Stories we're also working with repetition but this time the performers dance the same solo as a canon, overlapping one after the other.) The audience was invited to wander the site before being invited to take a seat to watch the performance, looking out over the vast site from the top of a hill.

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