Artistic director, concept: Michèle Murray
Artistic collaborator: Maya Brosch
Performers: Marie Leca, Jonathan Sanchez
Duration: 15 minutes
Premiere: Festival Uzès Danse 2016
Support: ZZT Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln
Work residencies: Espace Bernard Glandier Montpellier
With the help of ICI-CCN Montpellier and Epsedanse Montpellier
The ATLAS / STUDIES project consists in an open series of short pieces concerned with body representations and contemporary mythology, resonating with our times.
The central question: How do our bodies incarnate our era, and what do they tell us about it?
These dance pieces are independent but all are linked:
- Through form, inspired by the study such as one finds in painting or music
- Through content about body representation, modern myths and our time.
The studies can be performed separately as choreographic objects, or one after the other, as an evening-length show. They function like snapshots, oscillating between abstract, narrative and figurative forms, and without a classical beginning or end. Together, these studies form a choreographic and spatial atlas of contemporary bodies and the stories they tell.
ATLAS / STUDY # 6: A performance dealing with passages and transformations in intimacy, friendship and love.
PRESS ATLAS / STUDIES
Lise OTT / Midi Libre / June 30, 2016 / An Atlas of sound and fury.
“A series of short pieces about the body and its representation, resonating with our times”: With the two newest pieces of this project of unlimited works, Michèle Murray has not abandoned her goal of a simultaneously abstract and narrative dance. But she has changed her focus.
Encased in a format not exceeding 25 minutes, each work has two to five performers putting their sensations and feelings to the test of the world. And it hots up!
The first study consists in a duel leading up to a trance to the electro beats by composer Gerome Nox, and echoes the spellbinding excitement of clubbing. The second duet, heady and atmospheric, is worthy of a pared down and refined Kamasutra in which the two performers never lose physical contact to each other. In both cases, the pieces are an exercise in which improvisation is subjected to strict rules. The French – American choreographer Michèle Murray was inspired by the style and “stream of consciousness” technique of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”, which echoes our times.
Performed at the “Uzès Danse” Festival in June 2016, these works testify to the choreographer’s wish to battle it out with our era, in keeping with her image as a fighter. She modulates the facets of this combative image through the prism of a choreographic and memory-laden atlas in space, inspired by the eponymous project of art historian Aby Warburg. Often invited to Germany (her Study # 1 was created with students of Cologne’s University for Music and Dance), the choreographer thus reconfigures her own personal atlas without borders.
Cécile GUYEZ / La Gazette de Montpellier / July 13, 2016 / Twisted bodies, angry bodies, bodies in the limelight of a fashion show…Choreographer Michèle Murray scans our carnal envelope in six short pieces consisting in duets and quartets, which are part of her project “ATLAS / STUDIES”, and which were performed in the frame of the “Mouvements sur la Ville” dance festival in Montpellier.
In the first piece, revolt brews in choreographed diagonals of great strides and rock icon postures. A second piece follows, in which two dancers perched on high heels dance like dislocated fashion models. Relationships are reflected in very violent or extremely sensual and gentle “pas de deux”, such as in the male duet in which two bodies seem to roll into each other and become one. In the last piece, explosive and funny, the body itself is the performance space for a battle each person wages against himself, accompanied by the rhythms of exacerbated bases. So what for fitness!
Gérard MAYEN / LA Gazette de Montpellier / July 9, 2015 / In “ATLAS / STUDIES”, a project choreographed by Michèle Murray, one retains the second word in particular. Three short independent pieces are performed one after the other. The first piece consists of trenchant observations in a quartet made up of youthful and suggestive attitudes. This piece is followed by a female duet, in which the dancers share the mysterious effects of support and impact. The male duet ends the evening with stunning entanglements, bodies rolling on the ground and segmented moves which create meaning. All in all, two evenings which display strong commitment.