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Choreography and dance : Camille Mutel

Video : Marie Drach
Music : Philippe E. Colas

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One crosses Etna! as one is crossed by a dream. Gravity and sleep numb the body and allow the release of deeply embedded images.

Because the body is slow, images may take time to be born and disappear one after the other, without any logical sense. Yet, a certain coherence links them, a rhythm, a colour or simply a precise distance between them.

Evoking images of animality or the subconscious, these images are apparitions, projected onto the skin itself, transforming the body and the space in which it moves into a single entity. The body is a screen that becomes part of the landscape.

There is ritual, almost shamanic, ceremony in this journey. A rite of passage, as can be as suggested by the opening scene in which the dancer carries a stick that is precariously balanced on her shoulders.

One of the interests of choosing the dream as the focus of this work is its instability. Etna! is named after a volcano followed by an exclamation mark. This title is in itself imaginary and symbolic: a fusion of desire and eruption, a strong sensual connotation, sexual, telluric and archaic.

Notwithstanding, the choreography and music start off in a certain torpor. In a final stage, the body which copulates with the void evokes that moment in our dreams when it is impossible to accelerate and escape from whatever is pursuing us; a moment that can reveal the failure of the will. Yet no anxiety affects this body; on the contrary, a deaf, slow pleasure seems to pervade it.

Etna! doubtlessly evokes impotence and desire, as two sides of the same coin, one feeding on the other. The piece tends towards the acceptance of one for the advent of the other.