Choreography and Interpretation

Nabih Amaraoui

Matthieu Burner

Artistic team

Massimo Furlan, scenography

Nicolas Fandar, light

Oliver Heinry, Matthieu Burner, Nabih Amaraoui, music

Residence of creation

Maison de la Culture de Bourges, France - 2004

Lengh

55mn

Production : 

Maison de la Culture de Bourges, Maison de la Culture d’Amiens (prod. déléguée), ABP

Formally called “Amaraoui Burner Project”, this piece was lately named “One to One”

History

This duet was born from the meeting of two individuals :

Nabih Amaraoui comes from a self-educated training in percussion. Entering the conservatory allows him to go further in this work, especially with Maghreb’s classical music.  He deepens his knowledge, discovering Zarb (percussion from Iran) with master Djamchid Chemirani, and continues his own personal research of Indian music, particularly Indian tablas. This percussionist’s training will be followed by a training in Maghreb’s occidental and classical music for mandolin. His experiences with string and percussion instruments heighten his attraction for erudite, sacred and traditional musics. 

Matthieu Burner opens himself to the classical and baroque music worlds through his cello education.  In addition, he learns the basics of guitar and so, connects with ethnic, Gypsy and flamenco music.   He also develops a personal research using new technologies. In may 2003 during a choreographic research in Nottingham, he presents for the first time his electro-organic music, from strings to bodies. On the request of Philippe Saire, he goes further in his research and creates the original music for the solo « jour de fuite ».

Our first meeting took place at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, where we followed for two years the same intensive artistic education.  Through different work in theater, dance and music, we developed a common vision. Strong personal links interlaced and deepened, resulting in an artistic conception. Our professional paths brought us together, first to Lausanne for 3 years and then to Berlin, where we started our collaboration.  The complicity we shared regarding nomadism updated our common interests for music and dance.  It also unveiled a distinction concerning our origin, socially and culturally,  Nabih coming from Algeria and Matthieu from Grenoble.

Artistic line

Our artistic trajectory could be defined through the interpenetration and the polyvalence of music, physicality and theater.  We don’t want to confine dance, music or theater, but to find a way to bring these 3 art forms together, using the globality of the live show.

Our research orientates itself towards communication and non-communication : media development, dependance on communication devices, changes in human communication modes.  We see the creation process more like a learning path, rather than the construction of a finished product.

MOVEMENT

Movement is the authentic physical concretization of stimuli coming from different situations, concrete or psychological.  It has no self-sufficiency : it is not justified within itself.

We see the performer as a coffer of resonance, confronting the external influences in his internal structure, to appropriate, deflect or even transcend them. As a result, the movement finds its own meaning.  The logical and necessary consequence can then take a theatrical or a danced form.  We extract the essence of quotidian reality through complex concepts which restrain the performers physically and psychologically, creating a powerfull and authentic visual-emotional impact.  This establishes a precise structure giving absolute freedom to a spontaneous interpretation, allowing a constant renewal of movements, ideas and opinions.

SOUND

Due to each of us coming from a musical backgroung, we are conceding a special attention to the sound that covers the whole project.  This creation is like a travel through the material of sound and not an exploitation of the preset codes leading to a finished product.  We are interested in the sound’s result, but our greater concern is what it generates inside the spectator’s emotional structure and its connection to the associated visual element.

We define sound like a component influencing or disturbing time and space, as dance and light also do.  How can sound give us another perception of time?  By slowing it down, accelerating or freezing it?  How does it influence space?  By contracting, densifying it?  Or the opposite, by opening it to make a scene breathe?  This way, the sound is autonomous and follows its own evolution that can sometimes accompany the dance, and in other cases disconnect from it.

The creation process for sound will be visible on stage.  We see the stage’s reality like a starting point, like a source of sounds.  Live, captured by many microphones, they will be introduced into a looping machine (a machine allowing to repete acoustic sequences and overlaying them).  Thus, an acoustic memory from past actions that will be created, while they are still going on.  A lag between these actions and the sounds that they produced will be created.  This could result in absurdity, which would increase the emotional impact of the scenes.

We also want to play with sounds that are not directly perceived by the ear.  Using infra low and ultra sounds will first provoke a physical perception in the audience.  Since this sensation is absolutly unusual in the person’s receptivity process, the spectator will find himself in a state of constant waking.  Therefore, his visual understanding will be intensified by the strangeness of the produced sensations.

The work will be supported by a multi-diffusional sound system that allows to direct sound all around the audience, making it travel.  This process strengthens the sensations generated by movement, space and volume.  This system gives the sound development a wider frame, immersing the spectator deeper into our universe.

THEME

As a main theme, we are using the inquiry into the concept of EGO and the OTHER.  Who is the other that will accompany us and whom we will accompany?

How is he a stranger to us, stranger in the literal and the figurative senses?  « The Stranger » is the man facing the world, « The Stranger » is the man among the men, so it is myself towards myself.  « The Stranger » is in every moment facing us in the mirror.

The topic of identity seems to have a strong importance.  How do we define ourselves towards ourselves, the world, the others?  Is the relationship between domination/submission an unavoidable model, inherent in every human relation?  It seems that nowadays, it governs all international functioning, which to us, appears destined to fail.

We can only define ourselves through the dialectical relationship between EGO and the OTHER.  If there is no stranger in our identity, we cannot recognize ourselves.  If we are alone, without the other, what can we understand?  We would be filled with our truth, without dualism.

Do we belong to a location or does a location belong to us?  Who and what are we without a place of belonging?  Travelers, homeless, exiled people, refugees…

A location is a matter of desire, cohabitation, passage.  Location is the base of memory.  What is left from a place if it is not the memory of it? These questions affect us especially since they are very current on TV, radio, in newspapers…

A kind of absurdity is defining the beginning of our century.  Take Internet for example.  It allows us an international communication without limits, a knowledge of the extraordinary Other, a bringing together of the individuals no matter the distance.  We witness at the same time a safe phenomenon : the creation and maintenance of a general psychosis, the Other being labelled by a primary education manicheism.

Consequently, the political engagement of the piece appears inescapable to us.  However, our work is not reduced to a pure and simple denunciation.  It is meant to be radical but opened from various points of view.  This work in which we engage ourselves is directly linked to The Stranger of Albert Camus, which in the literature’s milieu of that time, was a stranger itself.  It came from the other side of the line, from the other side of the sea.  It is a work of an astonishing posterity, curiously current.

The Stranger is perhaps simply the mirror of each one of us.

Produced by Maison de la Culture de Bourges

Maison de la Culture d’Amiens