Becoming aware of the death of my youth, the end of the beginning. More precisely, the end of the youth of my dancer’s body, which, with age, is transforming… into something else.

I like to try to answer serious questions by offering joyful, poetic and light resolutions. But then, how do you go from entropy to the poetic?

Plier Déplier Peuplier is a single project played out in three different ways. A confidence-show about the work of time. A fall… but forwards.

Plier takes the form of a solo, infused with choreography, gesticulation, humour and intimacy. I look at what is left of my body, with its falling hair and its stumbling knees. Patiently setting about mapping it, then taking an inventory of its gestures: what remains of 20 years of practising academic dances and so-called “contemporary” ones, of exploring rhythm — through tap dance and the percussive body — but also of tours and cracks? How can I have fun modulating my gestures through repetition, transgression, the fall, the distortion of time, exploring the grotesque, the sensual, play? How do we go from the intimate to the common?

For Déplier, I add a scenographic device. Intimate in form, I invite the spectator as close as possible. Seats on stage left and right allow them to scrutinise the dark corners, feel the crash of the falls and see the sweat glisten on my skin. The proposition is addressed to them directly and at its rawest. Once this frame is set, I add to the gestures discovered in Plier a dialogue with mechanical devices borrowed from new magic. These mechanisms — disturbing reality — draw my body into a dialogue with time. A scenography made of fragile, rickety objects, collapsing gradually and inevitably: spherical plaster mobiles that rise and spin, a Pandora desk, an asthmatic metro-drone…

As a resolution, the audience is invited onto the stage to dance on the ashes of this set reduced to pieces, in a gigantic end-of-the-world disco ball…

Finally, for Peuplier, the solo becomes a duet. I invite a peer, haunted by these same questions, to co-recreate a unique performance. A short period of work beforehand on the material of Plier to move together into the set of Déplier, and play at being a mirror, being a ghost, being a presence, for a performance that is unique every time.

I will soon be 40 and I am still a sleepwalker, caught somewhere between my dreams and reality. May our entropy be a celebration, teeming, funny and inhabited by dancing gestures.

Virgile Dagneaux

What remains of twenty years of dance in a changing body? Virgile Dagneaux goes through his gestures, from tap dance to falls, and enjoys repeating them, distorting them, pushing them to the burlesque. The audience is close enough to hear the crash of the falls. Around the dancer, plaster spheres spin and wobbly objects eventually give way. As the set comes undone, the confidence takes on the air of a party. At the end of the fall, the audience is invited onto the floor for an end-of-the-world disco ball.

Book Déplier

In Peuplier, the solo Déplier opens up to another presence. For this performance, the dancer and choreographer Sandrine Lescourant joins Virgile Dagneaux. In three days, the two artists take up the gestures of the solo and replay them as a duo in the set of Déplier. By turns mirror, ghost or partner, each bends the other’s dance. From this encounter comes a new version of the piece, to be discovered for a single performance.

Book Peuplier