Dédale

Vertiginous poem

Creation notes

Dédale is an adaptation for aerial rope and voice of Ovid's Lettre d'Ariane à Thésée, set to a piano score by Eric Satie: les Gnossiennes 1, 2, 3 and 4.
This hybrid form of aerial dance on rope and theater is a vertiginous poem inspired by the rocks of the port of Locquémeau in Trégor. It is intended to be performed on the foreshore between two tides, or in a place that gives the impression of being on the shore of an island.

Ariadne's letter to Theseus echoes the heroine's voice in the place where Theseus abandoned her after helping him escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth, at the top of a windswept island. From this desert island, Ariadne writes to Theseus, recounting her abandonment and how she woke up that morning, a beautiful spring morning, alone. The dreadful doubts that seized her, her panic-stricken wandering along the shore and her frantic race to the top of the island to finally see and know that this ship is leaving without her, with on board the man who had sworn to love her forever, and who doesn't even look back.

The version adapted from Ovid's text and performed in the show can be read ➳ here

Ariadne's thread

The simultaneous use of text and aerial dance goes hand in hand with the idea that the acrobatic apparatus of the aerial rope will contribute to the text, increasing its narrative and dramaturgical power and giving it substance, but also that the text will bring the movement of the body into a narrative space.

The rope is at once the thread of Ariadne's narrative, the thread of her thoughts, the thread she unwinds to try to find her way back, Ariadne, lost on an island with no possibility of escape, lost for her country which she has betrayed, abandoned by the man she loved, lost by herself in the labyrinth of her illusions. The rope becomes, in turn, a mountain, the rope of a ship drifting away on the horizon, a reef, a cliff, a thread to which we hold ourselves from sinking into the sand, a thread to which we cling so as not to fall into the void, the ghost thread of another thread unwound in the hands of another.

Acrobatic technique is placed at the service of the poetry of the text. The choreography of the movements responds to the structure of the story, the text is recited from the body engaged on the rope. At times, aerial dance/suspension takes center stage to give the body space in the silence of the story. Hear the words echo in the silence, let them unfold in the movement of the body, in the breath of the wind and the sea, and weave another invisible thread between a legend and stories.

A few hours later, everything will be covered up, returned to the sea.

The thread of a piano

When I began work on Lettre d'Ariane à Thésée, it was the first time I'd gone into a show with no sound other than that of my voice, with great moments of dance deployed on the rope in silence. I dreaded the silence, dreaded losing myself in it. I needed a musical thread to hold on to.

The creation of Dédale was therefore based on music, with the idea of sowing notes in the silence so that I could find a path through it. For this show, I wanted to work to a very slow, very stretched rhythm, and give space to the unfolding of the text without bogging it down. Eric Satie's Gnossiennes came naturally to me, and I created the choreography for Dédale while listening to this music. I didn't know at the time that it was inspired by the Ariadne myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I discovered later.
I chose to make it disappear afterwards to leave room for silence. That's how Dédale made its debut, to the sound of a piano that only I could hear.

When I was editing the filmed sequences of Dédale on the Foreshore, it occurred to me that the piano was missing for fullness, and to render the music I hear resonating as I glide along my rope along the thread of Ariadne's letter. So I'd like to restore the piano to its rightful place at the heart of the labyrinth, by inviting a pianist to perform Gnossiennes 1, 2, 3 and 4 for each performance, according to the structure of the show.

The musician accompanying the show will be chosen by the host structure.