“This work connects us fundamentally to our inner emotions, it is about the intimate. It evokes suffering, pain, love, joy, everything that brings us together. The music draws from deep inside us, and awakens things that we do not control, that grab us and that make us vulnerable. In this sense, it is universal and accessible to all.”
Kader Attou
For more than 20 years, Kader Attou has constantly invented a dance full of images and emotions inspired by the laughter and drama of man. In 1994, he discovered and was overwhelmed by the Symphony n°3 called Plaintive songs, Symfonia Piesni Zalosnych, by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. In 2010, Kader Attou created Symfonia Piesni Zalosnych, a production for ten dancers, with the desire to inscribe his dance in the emotional power of the score. For the first time, he created by focusing on the entirety of the musical work and explored the encounter between hip hop and a form of ballet. Like music stripped of any superfluous effect or ornament, the dance deploys pure moves which dig the ground at the same time as it seeks the interiority and the elevation of beings.
A universal masterpiece, accessible to all.
Ten years later, he revives this production. Because it is still in him. Because it is part of this dancing humanity which embodies his work and the absolute urgency of being alive. In an imbalanced world that still tirelessly produces all kinds of war, this symphony sounds like a fight, a languid march between darkness and glimmer of hope. Often considered a work derived from the Holocaust, Kader Attou rehabilitates Gorecki’s desire to make it, above all, a tribute to the mother, to the woman, to the one who carries the origin of life. This revival strives to reveal the beauty of the lyrics and deepens the tensions between dance and the vibrations of music in order to both unite bodies and multiply their differences. On the tenuous thread of melodies, the dance draws life cycles, attracting the bodies towards the light, being carried by the dazzling crescendo of the strings and the absolute intensity of the soprano which tears the dark sky with its clear voice.
Choreography: Kader Attou
Music: Henryk Mikołaj Górecki Symphonie n°3 pour soprane et orchestre, opus 36
Éditions Chester / Éditions Mario Bois-Paris
Lighting design: Françoise Michel
Costumes : Nadia Genez
Cast: Aïda Boudrigua, Amine Boussa Margaux Senechault, Salem Mouhajir, Ioulia Plotnikova, Sebastien Vela Lopez, Virgile Dagneaux, Vaishali Trivedi, Majid Yahyaoui, Nour Attou
Production : Centre Chorégraphique National de La Rochelle, Kader Attou / Cie Accrorap
Coproduction : Festival Montpellier Danse 2010, La Coursive – Scène Nationale de La Rochelle, Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, Théâtre Jean-Vilar de Vitry-sur-Seine, Grand Théâtre, scène conventionnée pour la danse – Ville de Lorient
Avec le soutien du Conseil Général du Val-de-Marne
“The piece, created for ten dancers, is striking. The very physical dance conveys unexpected emotions. The bodies suffer, confront each other, and then come together in images of brotherhood. The choreography, wrapped in the magnificent lighting by Françoise Michel, exudes a serene harmony. In this music that has accompanied many years of his life, Kader Attou wants to hear laments but also a lot of hope.”
Marie-Valentine Chaudon – LA CROIX
“With ten dancers, the choreographer attempts to embody this delicate score, performed in its entirety. A real challenge where we find his favorite themes such as blending, origins, other cultures, faith, and encounters with others. On a stage shrouded in near-darkness, Attou unravels his hip-hop to weave in another thread, more contemporary and gentler too, with a certain spectral quality in the movement.”
Rosita Boisseau – TÉLÉRAMA
“There are choreographers who, with hip-hop, play with movement at all costs. Kader Attou has moved past this phase: born from hip-hop, it is poetry he now seeks. The ten dancers may well perform in sneakers, the hip-hop shoe, but the choreography throws them into momentum and mystery, supported by the milky chiaroscuro that bathes the stage: races, quests, losses, reunions in a gentleness that seems to exorcise even the very idea of evil or vengeance.”
Ariane Bavelier – LE FIGARO
“The dancers plunge into a profoundly humanistic dance, allowing their individuality to emerge. Inspired by music that swings between lamentations and cries of hope, they compose a committed score from which they seem not to emerge unscathed. The audience does not either.”
Claudine Colozzi – LA VIE
2023
2 June
Le Zef, Marseille
28, 29, 30 June
Montpellier Danse, Opéra Comédie
27 July
Aix-en-Provence, Ballet Preljocaj - Pavillon Noir, Un Air de Danse #2
2024
21 September
Belgique, OPRL Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège
Cie Accrorap
Direction Kader Attou
Reprise 2020
Création Festival Montpellier Danse 2010
Pièce pour 10 danseurs et danseuses
