Camille Mutel at the breaking point

 

"In ten years, Camille Mutel has carried out a complete revolution on herself. Her language, for which the word “choreography” seems too stilted, constantly explores new territories. Favoring intimate settings and proximity to the public, she creates true poetic theater wherein images and stories submit themselves to a delicate and radical breath of air. Each emotion rewrites itself to the rhythm of imperceptible gestures. Here we are also at the breaking point."

extract form Artpress 482 Nov 2020 - Camille Mutel at the breaking point - Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne

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Not I

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"She prepares to cook (for us?) and heightens the suspense until her knife cuts the onion that she has peeled, letting the blade fall (or the hand of a karateka slice through a brick). Mutel accomplishes a series of actions and takes roads similar to pilgrims. She faces a vise, advancing on her knees, pulling an enormous plank of untreated wood and takes out an enormous knife from her apron that is also a geisha or samurai robe. We would be tempted to talk of slowness, but as in butoh, it has to do with a certain state and openness. The butokas live it from the inside. With Mutel, everything is in how one addresses the world and the spectators. She creates still life compositions, scenes of crime or violence, showing us what remains of the act that preceded it. Her enigmatic or symbolic sculptural images and poses cut like the enormous kitchen knife, like the fish that she holds between her teeth that she ends up piercing as if in a ritual. Several times she suspends an instant where everything is decided, like an oracle. This geisha intrudes on a masculine universe, without going all the way to seppuku. The final act of the samurai is auto centric, whereas Not I creates a relational space. Obliged as a geisha, this feminism is made of absolute subtlety. "

Samurai I : Camille Mutel - Not I -- Thomas Hahn

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Go, go, go, said the bird (human kind cannot bear very much reality)

 

“Clearly, Camille Mutel pursues in her pieces asymptotic research on the hidden zones of eroticism, confronting the possibility, or not, of representing desire up until its fulfillment. At this stage, far from the oneirism of Etna, audacity follows other roads. (...) I saw there a new and surprising artistic object, beautiful and icy.” 

Guy Degeorges

 

« Humankind cannot bear much reality: the observation is especially true when it comes to erotic reality (…) Go, go, go : The « go on ! » of the bird questions the possibility of philosophical eroticism in the era of man-machine hybridization, when the relationships between real beings become more and more fictional. (...) Go, go, go said the bird is divided in scenes or rounds, between which Mutel and Chosson wash each other’s white skin with black towels like in a Japanese onsen. Each gesture develops out as much in time as in space and captures the vibrations of the voice of Isabelle Duthoit, an extraordinary vocalist and incredible phenomenon who sets off veritable guttural storms. In that austere space, her volcanic energy seems to connect Duthoit’s gut to the entrails of the earth, creating a third sensual dimension - the least pure and therefore the most troubling of this strange ritual.”

Thomas Hahn

 

“Camille Mutel occupies a place a bit outside the dance world. In effect, all her work consists in putting the intrinsic beauty of the feminine body in its entirety to the forefront and, following the example of a Cranach, delivers to the public its transparency, its diaphaneity, its fragility, but also, and most especially, the pulsations that animate it. And this she does with a science and incommensurable refinement..."

Jean Marie Gourreau

 

 

Etna !

 

"With 'Etna!' the nude Camille Mutel mixes both the muse and the faun in a single body. With a sculpture-like sketch and slowness, she unfolds gradually, allowing the faun to escape from the body of the muse, unless it is the other way around. Her skin becomes a screen on which feminine and masculine, memories and fantasies, are projected."

Le Jeudi

 

"The tendons are stretched, nerves quiver, slowly and deliberately. Hands become feet, feet become hands - an insidious complete metamorphosis that is almost imperceptible to the human eye. The art of Camille Mutel is perfected minimalism, both sensual and subtle. Mutel herself reflects and projects a work of art - timeless and at the same time in keeping with the times. She is an extraordinary contemporary dancer, looking less for energetic and sophisticated movements, but tending more to the appearance of immobility."

Tageblatt

 

"As always, the work of this choreographer from Nancy impresses with its plastic beauty and its demanding nature. Her nakedness, far from being immodest, makes her body a plastic sculpture, and her movement provides an extra touch of soul. 'Etna!' is the first time that she has worked with video. A high precision exercise by which she seems to play before our eyes the dialogue of two beings who are sometimes fusional, sometimes distinct."

Luxembourger Wort

 

" Etna… Could it be a volcano, which cowers under the ashes? No explosion. But tension. The dancer slowly makes her way, walking in a dream, walking on eggshells - the floor could be as burning as her thoughts. It is precisely because she is naked, present, seen, almost motionless, that everything can begin to fade, become impossible, under the disturbed lights of an enigma. From one room to another, naked, Camille Mutel never casts the same mystery twice. The flesh cannot be palpable or real, but abstract and sublimed like a pale image: an androgynous figure, frail body, delicate thinness, stylized sex. A set of pure signs, that video images contradict with a layer of masculinity. Little motion, sleepwalking, as if to lose us. She tends towards the asymptote, so exposed that the eye is guided towards its periphery, where it slides, leaving all its intact intensity in suspension."

extract from Medusa – un soir ou un autre – Guy Degeorges

 

 

Nu(e) muet

 

"A timeless rhythmic disembodiment in sound and light - strobe and laser beams - that is perfectly successful."

Mouvement - Florence Becanne

 

"An experience that cannot be ignored."

Marie-Laure Rolland

 

"A wonderful choreographic sculpture that we frankly look forward to see grow and develop on different stages"

Carolina Mark

 

 

Effraction de l'oubli

 

" Camille Mutel holds our breath, leaving us gasping."

un soir ou un autre

 

"The model - Her name is Camille Mutel. She could have been called Camille Claudel. It is indeed with a sublime science and mastery that she is able to magnify her body to make it sublime. A model of a statuesque beauty which lets itself be admired for almost an hour, imperceptibly turning on itself as if on a revolving stool in an artist's studio. An ineffable body, sprung from stone, caressed, modelled, carved, sculpted by the spotlight. This is a quivering being, with breathtaking sensitivity and sensuality, strongly radiating passion, the desire to be loved, the enjoyment of being admired."

cryptodance

 

"A phenomenon such as 'Effraction de l’oubli' was last introduced on the stage by the American, Maureen Fleming.  Mutel was a student and confidant of Kazuo Ohno. In Europe, Mutel was deeply immersed in butoh dance by Masaki Iwana and many others. And she succeeded, as Fleming once did, in stopping time and making the audience breathless with unceasingly renewed body-images. "

Thomas Hahn