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| | Arts Calendar / December 14 / Dance |
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20:00 | Contemporary Dance Festival Tsekh: Tarab |
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 The Contemporary Dance Festival Tsekh will take place on December 6-14, 2014. As always Tsekh will acquaint the audience with names and greatest achievements of European contemporary dance. The programme of this year's event will include a selection of the most interesting contemporary performances from Switzerland and Russia. Incidentally Tsekh-2014 was organized by the International Centre of Dance and Performance Tsekh and Meyerhold Center as the part of the cultural exchange program between Russia and Switzerland which was initiated by the Swiss Arts Council "Pro Helvetia". The dance creation "Tarab" will be presented by the Swiss "7273 Company" whish was founded by Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi. "Tarab" was produced to the 10th anniversary of 7273 Company's founding. Tarab is a key concept of Arab culture. It refers to the emotion created by the combination of poetry, music and spirituality. The Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, also known as "the mother of all Arabs," is the very embodiment of this synthesis. Tarab could be compared to groove in funk, to swing in jazz, or to duende in flamenco. It's that indefinable and inspired state of music that Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi have brought to their new work. As an integral part of this new stage of choreographic writing the music has provided the opportunity once again to collaborate with the composer Sir Richard Bishop. His worldview and inspiration find an echo in the fields that choreographers have explored; notably in their questioning of the relationships between the earthly and things of this world, spirituality and the divine, the body and sensuality. In Tarab, music and dance are interwoven in a "groovy Sufi ceremony" based on the search for an ecstatic dance, and organized around the group and its different personalities. This ensemble was propelled by the music with Arabo-Andalusian accents composed by Sir Richard Bishop. Cantillon and Yadi artistic approach aims at creating a movement language capable of inducing a form of hypnosis when performed. This exploration is filled with the curves and the flowing links found in Arabic calligraphy, to which they add references belonging to the history of Western dance. Doing so allows them to instill elements of imagination, or humor, which go beyond simple references or sources, and permits the necessary distance for reinventing ourselves. This approach emerges as well from the manner in which they use the singular gestural language which gave rise to the style known as FuitFuitt, created in 2006 and characterized by an ornamental and baroque dimension, devoid of syncopation: the movement unfolds in an uninterrupted flow without repeating itself. The result is a mesmerizing dance, inhabited by a desire for infinity, because we are indeed possessed by the thought of entering the movement and never leaving it. The ten dancers present on stage sustain this desire to further draw out time while creating a denser sense of community. Respectively born in Melun in 1972 and in Argenteuil in 1973, Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi share their lives and work together between Switzerland and France. Originally trained as a musician, Nicolas Cantillon starts his dance education at The Conservatoire Marius Petipa in 1989. Meanwhile, Laurence Yadi graduates with Honors from college where she studied Sport Science. She is then offered a scholarship to study at the Alvin Ailey School in New York. At the end of their postgraduate studies, both of them transition into working professionally as performers and assisting choreographers. They sometimes ended up working for the same company : Le Ballet Jazz Art de Paris, the Geneva based company Alias and Rui Horta for instance. Since the beginning of their collaboration, Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon have been touring internationally in Europe, Africa, Russia, USA, Asia and the Middle East. Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon received the Lietchi Foundation for the Arts Award for their 2006's Climax, and they won a Swiss Dance and Choreography Award with Nil in 2011. Laurence Yadi and Nicolas Cantillon's choreographic research is based around a "multi-dance-style" called FuittFuitt. They teach it in institutions like the CND de Paris, CFC, the Ballet Junior of Geneva and Konin Klijk Conservatorium in Antwerp, involving more and more dancers in the transmission process of FuittFuitt. More info
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