Soliloquy
inFlux Dance Company (Berne)
Surreal getting in touch In shirt and trousers, barefoot and head over heels in a suitcase (a metaphor par excellence for the mobility of a dancer’s life) Duméril pushes the prop through the partially lit space- until he bumps into an obstacle, his alter ego, Sipho Manashe. He ‘looks’ blindly with the pale sole of his foot directly into the dark-skinned person’s eyes. A surreal way of getting in touch in which the energy circle between the two dancers copleates itself. From then onwards the two cannot be without one another. And not without the suitcase: as home of the unconscious, it imposes itself between their movements, separates and connects them. This contains potential, even more so when the suitcase appears as partner or as rival which reflects the movements through imitation. Who is moving whom? The boundaries between the dead prop and the moving bodies dissolve. Just as the boundaries dissolve between the two soloists, whose pathways repeatedly intertwine through the dynamic game of attraction and repulsion, proximity and distance, aggression and tenderness. Doing instead of just thinking, is an upshot of the presented inner monologue which is strongest in the moments where it stays in physical abstraction; the intermezzo with the soap bubbles remains a foreign body. The fact that ‘Soliloquy’ is not a continuous composition but rather an addition of building blocks which glides from scene to scene (with an irritating fallacy before the end), is its only weakness. Otherwise it is a dense, conceptually convincing piece of musical and dance work. Through their strong stage presence, Sipho Manashe and Félix Duméril succeed in precise, installation-like balancing moments of highest eloquence. At the end there is only one of them left on stage and the message is clear and vivid: duality is broken open, healed. In a powerful finale of spinning, the suitcase starts flying, freeing the initial energy of inversion through a centrifugal force. Liberated. Marianne Mühlemann, Der Bund 3. February 2007
| Artistic Direction and Concept: | Lucía Baumgartner |
| Choreography: | Lucía Baumgartner |
| Choreographic Assistence: | Sarah Duc Dance Félix Duméril / Sarah Duc, Sipho Manashe / Lucia Baumgartner |
| Music: | Lior Navok |
| Text: |
LouAnn Cennerazzo |
| Voice: |
Sipho Manashe / LouAnn Cennerazzo |
| Sound Edition: |
Sam Baur |
| Light: |
hellblau |
