CLOSE UP 2.0  (2017)

«CLOSE UP 2.0»  

The concert pianist Cécile Thevenot performs hers and Thierry Zaboitzeffs compositions at the grand piano.

Five female dancers - bodies in concert - enter the stage, creating a physical dialogue with the pianist's performance, thus embodying and externalising the interior sounds and texture of the music. 

Fantastical lemur-like creatures - distorted, constricted and oppressed - invade the concert pianist’s perfect harmonic world, so that even the artificially encapsulated world of high culture, where the pursuit of perfection doesn’t leave any room for doubts, cannot escape from the tension of everyday cares and worries. Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a shadow of the desire for freedom, appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. The five dancers’ moving bodies - sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a seemingly inextricable agglomeration of extremities - constitute and articulate the physicality and motivations of strange, otherwordly creatures. Are they the pianist’s alter egos or dark suppressed aspects of her soul? While she is playing, these beings become her fellow antagonists and collaborators. They are suffused by the dense, mighty live music and then are driven or tortured, hunted or released, by the sounds around them. They resist – and they react. 

Since beginning work as a choreographer, Editta Braun, along with her company, has in the series of “LUVOS” productions (1985, 2001, 2012) again and again generated fascination and irritation in the perception of human bodies in movement.  Unconventionally used in surprising constellations, images and perspectives, torsos and limbs in movement metamorphose into unexpected pictures of life, never seen before, which, in a certain sense, appear to be wholly abstract from human beings.  The scenic invention CLOSE UP develops those well-proven dancing means of the editta braun dance company, putting them into a new context.

Editta Braun about the feminist aspect of CLOSE UP:

„I think that nowadays women’s rights are more and more in danger, even in our European societies. Many different, global crises overlap each other, we are the middle of epochal changes and challenges. And, very frighting, I observe a lash back to conservative, pre-democratic values, also in Europe. We women have to talk about that, we have to fight. And as I am artist, my only weapons are my artistic works. Theatre and performance is my Agora, my speakers’desk, my arena. I am a feminist. So it is clear that in my work I talk about feminist topics. In my way, with my means. CLOSE UP brings five female dancers and 1 pianist on stage - they fight, struggle, suffer, are light and heavy, happy and sad. Woven to each other by a deep complicity“.

Cécile Thévenot

After studying musicology at the Université de Bourgogne, Cécile Thévenot graduated at the Dijon Conservatoty (D.E.M.), passed her licence (piano) at the Music Academy of Turku (Finland) and in 2015 the Diplome d'État as a pianist at the Cefedem de Lorraine in Metz. Turned towards New Music, Improvisation and Experimental Music. In the collective Générale d'Expérimentation (Dijon) collaboration among others with Didier Ashour, Lê Quanh Ninh, Sylvain Kassap and Didier Petit. Concerts in France, Belgium, Finland, Estonia and Germany. Increasing focus on performing arts, collaboration with the sculptress and video artist Lucile Hoffmann, the marionettist Perrine Ferrafiat and the sound sculptrice Stefania Becheanu.

composition, live-piano: Cécile Thévenot

composition, musical direction:  Thierry Zaboitzeff  www.zaboitzeff.org  

dance, movement research: Sandra Hofstötter, Anna Lis, Martyna Lorenc, Anna Maria Müller, Sonia Borkowicz (Katja Bablick) 

lightdesign, technical direction: Thomas Hinterberger

dramaturgy:  Gerda Poschmann-Reichenau

choreography, artistic direction:  Editta Braun

photography: Bettina Frenzel

Management:  Antje Papke, management@editta-braun.com

production: Austrian Ministry of Culture, City of Salzburg, Region of Salzburg,  tanz_house Salzburg, co-producers: KosmosTheater Vienna, ARGEkultur Salzburg, manipulate Festival Edinburgh, Posthof Linz

Press about the previous version of this piece:

Visually, the effect of limiting the movement to hide parts of the dancers' bodies is both absorbing and unnerving. The richness of the imagery brings to mind Hieronymus Bosch's human limbs, that protrude angularly from eggs and other creatures: Braun has most viscerally brought to life the deformed and fragmented leftovers of a psyche.

[ ... ]

The final encounter and touch (between dancer and musician) is satisfying, and clearly points towards a less constrained future. A gloriously tongue-in-cheek (or butt cheek on keys) piece of surreal dance invention. (TV Bomb 01.02.2016)

... like all the best work at Manipulate, Close Up raises profound questions about the familiar shapes around us and how easily those perceptions can be disrupted, even as it also leads the pianist into an unsettling encounter with forces in her music of which she is barely aware, until they literally come to nudge her in the back.”

(The Scotsman, 06.02.2016)

Across an hour, the initial impact dwindles, but the sheer stamina of the performers – and the spurt of ensemble bopping when Michael Jackson's Billie Jean hits the keys – remains strangely fascinating.“

(Herald Scotland 02.02.2106)