First production / Dance - Music

“Yaourt - parler/chanter en yaourt (Yoghurt - to ‘speak yoghurt’ / to ‘sing in yoghurt’): gobbledygook, bad English. Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi, the two ‘enfants terribles’ of the Franco-Swiss dance scene, are offering us a musical and choreographic variation on glossolalia. Following Climax, Simple proposition and La vision du lapin, their first creations which laid down, through our eyes, their peculiar ‘physical grammar’, the company 7273 now grab our ears. With a series of folk songs typical of them, the duo gather their thoughts and examine a state of contemplation and calm with a simple and moderate attitude: intonations, rhythms, ups and downs… Laï, Laï, Laï, Laï… so that everyone can feel the rise of the dance!”

See synopsis (pdf / 56 KB) !In french!

“The dance as an urge to play

After the solitary incandescence of Climax, the company 7273 proposes a piece for four dancers, Laï laï laï laï, which places the spectator in an undefined space between folk concert and phantasmagoria.

At the origin of the project was an aspiration of the company to put themselves to the test, to depart from their speciality and venture into musical composition and song. A wish to distort or misrepresent themselves, to become clumsy and awkward, to claim a form of innocence as the regenerating principle of creation. Following the example of Henri Michaux whose practice as a painter completed the inadequacies of the poetic language: “It is for having liberated me from words, those clinging partners, that my drawings soar upwards and are almost joyful. In them I see a new language, turning their back on the verbal, the liberators”
(Mouvements).

This change of register works well: the usual vocabulary of the company, rather minimalist, henceforth makes full use of all the resources of stage design. Beginning with the folk music, original guitar composition played live by Nicolas Cantillon and sung by him in gibberish, a deliberate desire to distance himself from the posture of “singer with a message”. It is a matter of understatement. Folk music, with its libertarian breath, is sufficiently eloquent, rich in evocative inspiration for the spectacle.

Buttoned up tight in his sixties costume, Nicolas Cantillon is the mediator with another world, a sort of smuggler David Lynch style. The concert structures the space within which three characters disport themselves: Laurence Yadi, Alexandre Joly and Régis Marduel offer us a vision of fauns wearing masks, hairpieces and homespun frocks.

Three hieroglyphs, three intermediary creatures, three monstrous representatives of a forgotten territory: the psychological power of the costume which accomplishes a kind of return to the origins, in the manner of a dream. On this carpet, a veritable playground, relationships can be woven between these characters ; an interplay of forms that invites chance and the encounter with the others. Such as this sequence where the creatures play solitaire, as if to set our feet on the path of an ancestral rule, but only on the path because the play distils a pre-reflexive climate, both primitive and bathing the spectator in a state of dream-like consciousness: “There is something that participates like a magic operation in this intense liberation of signs (…)” (Antonin Artaud Le théâtre et son double).

Punctuating the action, a sound track orchestrated by Alexandre Joly, whose acuity and shrewdness work wonders here, seems to subtract a little more reality from the play and refer to a score that has been partly effaced. Laï laï laï laï functions like an open programme whose constituents produce fantasies. Far from all fossilized nostalgia, the company invites us to a rite of passage, both stimulating and salutary.

"Come a little bit closer (…)
just like children sleeping (…)
we can dream this night away (…)
because I'm still in love with you
I wanna see you dance again…"
Neil Young, Harvest moon.

Graziella Jouan, artistic contributor

Biography

Following a “sports-etudes” (sports + study) course in Paris, Laurence Yadi was awarded a grant to study at the Alvin Ailey Center in New York. She then came back to France and worked for the J.Art Ballet in Paris for three years. En 1999, she left for Germany where she performed for Karen Effenberger and Vera Sander.
In 2000, she became Rui Horta’s choreographic assistant during the creation of Blind spot. Following this experience, she worked in Switzerland in partnership with Guilherme Botelho, Kylie Walters, Gisela Rocha, etc.

Following a stint as a guitarist for ban Cryse 17, Nicolas Cantillon started his dancing training at the Conservatoire Marius Petipa in 1989. A year later, he started working for the J.Art Ballet in Paris, where he stayed for eight years. In 1999, Andy De Groat recruited him for Bob Wilson’s Magic Flute He then spent three years in the Geneva dance company Alias, working for Guilherme Botelho. In parallel, he worked with Gisela Rocha in Zurich, and Marisa Von Stockert in London.

Cast and crew & thanks

Concept, choreography, set, costumes: Nicolas Cantillon, Alexandre Joly, Régis Marduel, Laurence Yadi. Light design: Jean-Philippe Roy. Costumes realisation: Mathilde Gallay Keller, Maria Galvez. Guitar and voice: Nicolas Cantillon. Electroacoustic device: Alexandre Joly. Artistic collaborator: Graziella Jouan. Administration : Cécile Buclin. Touring : Richard Afonso

Production : Compagnie 7273 (Suisse – France). Coproduction : Les Subsistances, Lyon (F), O Espaco do Tempo, Montemor-o-novo (P), Dampfzentrale, Berne (CH), Gessnerallee, Zurich (CH). With support from Pro Helvetia – Fondation Suisse pour la culture, Etat de Genève – Département de l’instruction publique, Ville de Genève – Département des affaires culturelles, DRAC Rhône-Alpes, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Adami, Spedidam, Conseil Général de la Haute-Savoie, Fondation Corymbo / mediathek tanz.ch. Creation residencies: Studios de l’ADC, Genève - Les Subsistances, Lyon - O Espaco do Tempo, Montemor-o-novo.

Nicolas Cantillon & Laurence Yadi / Compagnie 7273 / Switzerland - France

« Laï laï laï laï »

First production / Dance - Music

Biography

Cast and crew & thanks

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