PRESS

MARCO BERRETTINI. TANTRIC ECSTASY

The choreographer delivers a sublime and aberrant hedonistic manifesto where the dancers vibrate as one extra-sensitive body.

Soma, from the ancient Greek word for body. Soma, also the name of that synthetic drug presented as a simple medicine to the citizens of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's dystopia, but which in fact plunges them into a paradisiacal sleep, the kind that defuses any form of political insubordination. Thinking about this terrifying and wonderful substance can help to imagine the atmosphere emanating from Marco Berrettini's stage, one of the most complex and baroque we have ever seen choreographed: that of a sect of ecstatic dancers, a kind of vibrating body inexorably moved by the aberrant community they form, which seems to have sprung straight from the retrofuturistic ruins of a 1970s sci-fi film (cream carpet, silver jumpsuits, black piano). In the hall, exclamations of half-laughter and half-fear erupt as the dancers penetrate our gaze with their adoring eyes, since hedonism here takes on a monstrous tinge, joy with melancholy – do they not seem to be giving all their energy for one last dance? – without the piece ever abandoning its cardinal value: that of pure pleasure in communing as one body, in the same way to funk or to Meredith Monk.

The comparison to Huxley's drug doesn't hold up for long, however. Unless one considers them tragically stupefied, and thus reads this piece as a satire of a depoliticized generation, for example. It's better to see it as a highly political tantric farce, in what it says about the freedom of bodies to harmonize, their capacity to become extra-sensitive to others, as well as to the slightest vibrations of air, plants, and sounds. Its way of claiming the right to be ecstatic about these sensations, with this irreducible strangeness, makes it a masterful piece that one would love to see toured after its premiere at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis.

Eve Beauvallet

in Libération