Premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2015
A community of seven performers puts its unity and its bonds to the test. Trapped within a narration that keeps looping back to the beginning, they topple the balance of every situation, keeping in mind that the central concept of repetition forbids neither movement nor transformation. On the stage, they draw cards: the Oblique Strategies created by musician-producer Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt, which give them rules to follow, to break, to stack one on top of the other. Their accumulation creates the fertile ground on which the group play and stumble, eager to experiment with states, emotions, intentions. Mischievous and sometimes wicked children, romantic characters that fall prey to melancholy... Everything is created in front of us, between extreme precision and fragility, carried by pre-recorded sonic loops which are then reinvented by the dancers. In this invariably circular process begin to appear breaches, like pockets of freedom that each and every one can enter to escape destiny. For through this attempt to break free within repetition itself, what we’re talking about here is artistic creation. Much like Timbuktu, a name everyone is familiar with but which is forever fantasized, interpreted and sublimated.
Renan Benyamina for the Festival d’Avignon
As a child I thought Timbuktu didn’t really exist, and the expression to ‘‘go to Timbuktu’’ conjured for me – and probably for everyone – the idea of going to an unknown place. I like the corresponding idea of evoking a fantasized place where everything is possible. Déjà-vu is an ordinary yet complex phenomenon: ‘‘this familiar experience consists in the firm conviction that a current perception has awoken the memory of a past one impossible to clearly identify. It triggers an impression of strangeness where the usual temporal reference points are abolished and the fantasy of another life occurs freely.’’
Timbuktu déjà-vu presents seven characters who form a small community, symbolizing a ‘‘strange little republic that, while so logical, grave, positive, meticulous and thrifty, still falls victim to so vast and precarious a dream’’ (Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee).
Fanciful, fantasized and archaic, the community includes several individuals whose connections are reinvented through guidelines borrowed from Brian Eno’s Oblique strategies read out loud by each one in turn. Built on a cyclical mode, the piece opens with an inaugural scene (a “white choreographic landscape“) that repeats itself, offering various choreographic and vocal resolutions.
In this perpetual renewal is an implicit reading of everything that creates an individual in relation to others, in the ideal quest for fraternal or amorous fusion, as well as in social relationships where the exercise of power and domination come into play.
At several points there are possible escapes that open up a space of freedom, a kind of psychic decompensation juxtaposing dreams, solitude and a feeling of depersonalization.
Fragments from the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter’s coming-of-age novel Der Hochwald punctuate these breaks by portraying a sensory landscape where descriptions of wide-open spaces sound like fairytales (“there is a place deep in the woods – that I’ve known for a long time...’’).
Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh
EMMANUELLE VO-DINH
Emmanuelle Huynh has studied both philosophy and dance. In 1994 she was awarded a prestigious Villa Médicis hors-les-murs grant to go to Vietnam, and upon her return she created her first piece, a solo, Múa, This creation was the first step in her ongoing creative collaborations with artists from different fields.
She continued her choreographic work with Tout contre (1998) and Distribution en cours which places an astrophysicist and his research on black holes onstage with six dancers (2000); Bord, tentative pour corps, textes et tables, a choreographic project based on texts by Christophe Tarkos (2001); Numéro (2002); A Vida Enorme/épisode 1, a duo based on texts by the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder (2003). In Heroes (2005) she placed onstage heroic figures from our childhood; Le Grand Dehors (The Great Outdoors), a tale for today (2007); The Monster Project (2008) a dialogue of choreographic language created with the Japanese choreographer Kosei Sakamoto; In 2009, the creation of her piece Cribles at the Festival Montpellier Danse introduced a new relationship with music in the choreographer’s creative process; Spiel, a duo with the Japanese performance artist Akira Kasai (2012).
From 2004 to 2012 Emmanuelle Huynh was the Director of the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers (CNDC), where she implemented her project for this national choreographic center which is also an institution of higher learning focused exclusively on contemporary dance. The two programs of the school were offered to young choreographic artists, performers (the FAC program) as well as young creators (the Essais program).
In 2013, Emmanuelle Huynh reactivated her Compagnie Mùa, continuing her creation and pedagogical work as well as international and transdisciplinary projects. In October 2014 she created TÔZAI!... piece for 6 performers (whose her) at Théâtre Garonne in Toulouse. At the same time, based on an invitation from the French Embassy in New York, Emmanuelle Huynh began a two year project, A taxi driver, an architect and the High Line, with Jocelyn Cottencin, consisting of film portraits and performance pieces which will create a portrait of the city of New York through its architecture, its spaces and its residents.
Since 2014, she has been an associate assistant Master at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Nantes.
