At first, the story seems to have an if not predictable, at least classic vein, in which someone who doesn’t fit in where they used to live now has to spend time there. However, some sketches of confrontation are diluted in what becomes a literal dance of increasing hypnotic force that captures everyone’s attention, impulses, and feelings.
Bolero is certainly Maurice Ravel’s best-known piece, but it is rarely performed with the choreography that Bronislava Nijinska created to accompany it at the time of its premiere. Nijinska’s ballet responds to the repetitive structure of Ravel’s composition according to a logic of capillarity, with a phrase of movements that successively dominates the corps de ballet (initially static, finally frantic). Director Nans Laborde-Jourdàa takes these two works as his starting point and produces a fictional dialogue in which we return to a childhood place with nostalgia and awe. But in his version, the starting point is the body of the dancer François Chaignaud, who reinterprets Bolero as if it was the tale of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (where music is replaced by the gestures of feet and hands, and where dance does not attract the innocent, but installs the revolutionary power of desire). Invisibility becomes, in a public toilet cubicle, a form of sublimation of repression and a contagious celebration of the powers of seduction. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
