Creation
2023
In my work, the body is always the starting point of the choreography. Each dance piece is therefore created with and according to the individuals who are part of it. Following this principle, the primary subject of the creation DANCEFLOOR is the team of 25 dancers of the “Ballet de Lorraine”, a group going through the same research while being constituted of unique individuals.
DANCEFLOOR explores the different choreographic possibilities made possible through a big group, while at the same time focusing on the unique bodies and personalities of each performer. Therefore, the “Ballet de Lorraine” is the first subject of DANCEFLOOR.
DANCEFLOOR also links the many forms of dance that exist in the dancers’ bodies today, in this case, the dancers of the “Ballet de Lorraine”. These forms range from the vocabulary of classical ballet to that of various contemporary dance techniques, as well as dances that could exist on a dancefloor.The challenge is to bring these varied dance forms and styles to life together, letting the different forms meet and influence each other on stage.
Finally, we want to make you feel the vitality of life through the variety and abundance of energies, spaces and forms.
Concept, choreography: MICHELE MURRAY
Dancers: BALLET DE LORRAINE
Sound: Gerome NOX
Set design: Koo JEONG A
COSTUMES: Laurence ALQUIER with the Atelier costumes du CCN Nancy – Ballet de Lorraine
Artistic collaboration : Alexandre BACHELARD, Maya BROSCH, Marie LECA
PARTNERS
PRODUCTION : CCN NANCY – BALLET DE LORRAINE
© Laurent Philippe
PRESS DANCEFLOOR
Ouvert aux publics / By Laurent Bourbousson – July 6, 2024
https://ouvertauxpublics.fr/vu-montpellier-danse-atk-et-michele-murray-deux-grandes-choregraphes/
Montpellier Danse: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Michèle Murray, two major choreographers
Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, the new work by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Michèle Murray’s Dancefloor for CCN – Ballet de Lorraine, were two of the highlights of the Montpellier Danse Festival.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga explore The Four Seasons in a high-flying choreographic game…
Michèle Murray offers Ballet de Lorraine a breathtaking Dancefloor
There are those discreet choreographers who pursue a career that the public rarely encounters. Michèle Murray belongs to this category. Reluctantly, we might add. Indeed, opportunities to come across her work are very few and far between. But that’s without counting on the Montpellier Danse Festival and the CCN ICI, in the south of France, who always give her an exposure. So much the better!
That evening, on opening night, the audience at l’Agora was able to witness the expanded version of Dancefloor, a piece originally created in 2023 for the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine, which was then part of a double – program and only lasted around 30 minutes.
For this creation, Michèle Murray becomes the conductor of 24 performers, each one more talented than the last. The Ballet’s youth explode onto the Agora stage in a choreographic score of infinite movement and electroacoustic composition by Gerome Nox.
The show is everywhere. It embraces the stage as well as the wings, including the steps leading up to the courtyard gallery.
The choreographer doesn’t conjure a single form of dance, but a whole range of movement styles and genres that animate the bodies of the 24 dancers, reflecting the excellence of Ballet de Lorraine. Each dancer embodies their commitment to the stage with rigor and veracity. They are brilliantly talented and illuminate the courtyard of the Agora.
Dancefloor recounts the hopes, loves, sorrows and fierce desires to live of the coming generation. The performers revive the expectations and desires we had when we were young, and which we may have lost during our lives. They are the optimism we need to make our way through the jungle that our world has become.
Midi Libre / By Jéremy Bernède – July 3, 2024
https://www.midilibre.fr/2024/07/03/montpellier-danse-le-ballet-de-lorraine-enflamme-le-dancefloor-pour-la-choregraphe-michele-murray-12057700.php
Montpellier Danse: The Ballet de Lorraine sets the dancefloor on fire for choreographer Michèle Murray. An extended version of a creation by Michèle Murray for the twenty-four dancers of the National Choreographic Center Nancy – Ballet de Lorraine. (Centre chorégraphique national-Ballet de Lorraine).
For the 44th Montpellier Danse festival, Michèle Murray created an extended and expanded version of Dancefloor for the 24 dancers of the Centre chorégraphique national-Ballet de Lorraine. An electrifying composition that embraces the gestural, technical and sensitive possibilities of a virtuoso new generation. “Can’t you make them a little longer?” asked a little boy in an old French advert for elongated chocolate cookies that are always too short for our sweet tooth. We don’t know if he used the same (irresistible) childish tone, but it’s more or less the same request that Montpellier Danse festival director Jean-Paul Montanari made to Michèle Murray after discovering Dancefloor, her 2023 creation for the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine. Now that we’ve seen it, we know… and we want more!
Combining vocabularies
Dancefloor was originally commissioned by Petter Jacobsson, director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Lorraine. This thirty-minute piece offered Michèle Murray the rare opportunity to work with an entire ballet, in this case 24 dancers. While these young artists’ dance skills are fundamentally classical, their vocabulary also incorporates contemporary gestures and is no stranger to the body language of clubbing. Although they all appear on the bare stage of the Théâtre de l’Agora in jeans and t-shirts, there’s nothing of a uniform about them nor anything standard -looking. Each wears his own style of pants and his own style of T-shirt. And each presents himself to the world with his own brand of classic posture, if not iconic pose. The music is not (and never will be) evocative of a dancefloor: composed by Gerome Nox, the electroacoustic score is devoid of any rhythmic pulse, but instead screeches, drones, buzzes and swirls in more or less anxiety-inducing noise gusts.
Group dance and the individual.
When all the dancers have gathered in the white square of the dance floor, Michèle Murray can begin her physical way of composing, which is both musical and musical. She plays with the contrast between the classical dance ensemble movements that form the main melodic line, albeit lightly, and the more explosive, earthy gestures that emerge randomly, freely, between counterpoint and dissonance. As the light changes, so does the visual landscape. Here, 24 dancers pause together, still posing, and their freshness is enough to fill us with admiration. Here, a few of them take off at breakneck speed. Soon there’s a succession of crossing moves, some with jumps, some with arabesques, some with turns… without a rhythm ever imposing a rigor that would anonymize the impulses: they belong to each of those they inspire. And always sudden bursts of movement at 120 BpM. Working relentlessly on loops of slow gesture, the repetition of brief motifs, like different kinds of physical alliteration, and breaks in tone and time, Michèle Murray succeeds in expressing the beauty of group dance, of vibrating as a whole, without ever losing the beauty, both superior and interior, of each person in his or her dancing singularity, twirling, statuesque or simply alive. A languid tableau of disheveled and dislocated lifts is the acme of a show that refuses to go there and starts anew. Once again, ensemble after ensemble, enlivened from within by sudden inspirations and leisurely shifts.
The music is still elsewhere, rumbling, industrialized, indifferent, unsettling. The pas de deux begin to evolve, emotion enters, kisses are exchanged, lifts increase and go up higher, slow dancing together is experimented with… Embrace without tiring of it. “Can’t you make them a little longer?” Dancefloor /has a taste of “revenez-y”, yes, we should definitely come back.
THE BALLET DE LORRAINE IN ALL ITS DIVERSITY / APRIL 3, 2023 / BY OLIVIER FREGAVILLE GRATIAN D’AMORE – L’ŒIL D’OLIVIER
On a Saturday night at the Opéra national de Nancy, Ballet de Lorraine brings the stage to life even more intensely than usual. Under the direction of choreographers Michèle Murray and Adam Linder, the corps de ballet lays bare its diversity for all to see.
Under the sunlights
The theater is plunged into darkness. On stage, a shadowy figure wearing a luminous, neon-green jacket twirls and twirls, becoming familiar with the stage, taking in every nook and cranny. In a few minutes, the nightclub will open, and the dancefloor will be trodden by dozens of clubbers. Wearing a sequined T-shirt and fashionable jeans rolled up at the ankles, the first dancer to appear throws himself into the lion’s den. With his precise movements and extended legs, he is impressing. Barely twenty, Gabin Schoendorf, a recent graduate of the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine’s professional integration program, inhabits the stage, radiating it with his impeccable mastery and incredibly mature presence. Surrounding him, the others observe him, gauge him, wait for the right flow. One after the other, the 24 performers of Ballet de Lorraine enter the dance floor and let themselves be carried away by the waves of sound, sometimes gentle, sometimes tempestuous, imagined by Gerome Nox.
Drawing her inspiration from the energy of the dancefloor, Michèle Murray sketches the lives of clubbers, those night owls who, alone or with others, play out their existence to the beats and changing lights each evening. The Montpellier-based Franco-American choreographer’s precise choreographic writing and chiseled grammar create a rigorous work, a luminous group piece in which each element has its place, giving the whole its power and visceral beauty. Nourished by the work of Merce Cunningham, with whom she trained, she instills in her prose a lightness and purity of line made up of particularly refined pliés, déroulés and jetés. On stage, couples form and dissolve. Each movement, each gesture is perfectly fluid. In unison, galvanized by Michèle Murray’s fine, astringent work, the corps de ballet illuminates the stage and proves its excellence once again.
BALLET DE LORRAINE — MICHELE MURRAY AND ADAM LINDER / APRIL 7, 2023 / BY CLAUDINE COLOZZI / DANSE AVEC LA PLUME
For the second program of its 2022–2023 season, the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine has invited two choreographers, French – American Michèle Murray and Australian Adam Linder, to create two works celebrating “the notion of group dance itself”. On paper, DANCEFLOOR, by Montpellier-based choreographer, and Acid Gems, by Berlin-based choreographer, may appear very different, but at times they converge with surprising porosity. For both choreographers, the stage is an intriguing and complex terrain of expression into which the company’s performers throw themselves with energy and voracity. Combined, the two pieces make up an evening showcasing two intelligent choreographic styles that value the group without erasing individuality.
DANCEFLOOR by Michèle Murray – Ballet de Lorraine
The theater has just been plunged into darkness. Not yet fully accustomed to the darkness, we are startled by a figure in a large fluorescent jacket, spinning like a top. Like a sentry on guard duty. The dancefloor, which gives the piece its title and its double meaning, appears. Twenty-four soberly dressed performers gradually fill it. A few discreet sequins shining on the T-shirts evoke the festive atmosphere. For this commission from the Ballet de Lorraine, Michèle Murray wanted to mobilize the entire company and involve them, as is her custom, in the creative process, between technical exactitude, rigor and freedom.
In a set composed of abruptly changing lights, 24 dancers inhabit this dancefloor, infusing it with their energy, heating it up. They unravel a ” movement alphabet ” that is dear to the choreographer, in the spirit of Merce Cunningham. The composition mixes elements of academic vocabulary (jumps, déboulés, arabesques, dégagés…) with minimalist clubbing movements. Both constraint and space for freedom, this dancefloor is inhabited in different ways by each performer, each making this chiseled score his own. Dance, music, and lighting are all interwoven with great coherence.
Gerome Nox’s electroacoustic soundscape creates a fluctuating atmosphere on the dancefloor, plunging the dancers into a state of weightlessness. The sound contributes greatly to the overall tone of the piece, which is perfectly in tune with each performer. The chemistry between the company and the choreographer was clearly there. It’s a safe bet that we’ll be seeing DANCEFLOOR on tour soon.
SCENE WEB. FR / APRIL 5, 2023 / BY BELINDA MATHIEU
For the Ballet de Lorraine, Michèle Murray creates DANCEFLOOR and Adam Linder creates Acid Gems – two ballets with a clubbing spirit that complement each other with their unique textures, choreographic styles, and soundscapes.
In its second program of the year, the Ballet de Lorraine once again proves its astounding capacity for adaptation, stepping into Michèle Murray’s and Adam Linder’s choreographic writing.
With their singular textures, soundscapes and styles, DANCEFLOOR and Acid Gems take us into two distinctive nightclubs, where the clubbing codes permeate the choreographic composition. A glimpse into the future of ballet?
Michèle Murray’s DANCEFLOOR resembles neither that of Marco Da Silva Ferreira, with its fluorescent costumes, nor that of (LA)HORDE, where energy is expelled to the point of exhaustion. The Franco-American choreographer, who trained in classical dance and with Cunningham, opts instead for a gray stage design, nearly normcore costumes (blue or gray jeans and T-shirts) and subtle movement choreography. The dancers are evenly positioned across the stage, almost at equal distances from each other, and each one seems to be performing his or her own score. Is this an effect of Michèle Murray’s instant composition approach? Some move very little, others deploy gestures stretched out in space, with a classical physicality. Ballet movement and arabesques sometimes emerge. They mingle with club dance movements, surrounded by Gerome Nox’s humming, soaring soundscape and hypnotizing flashes of colored light. The overall experience is like an after-party vision, somewhere between chaos and grace.
These two ” clubbing ballets ” chart the future of the ballet genre. The soundscapes are electro, the set design is made up of intense, colorful lights, and the choreography deftly weaves together a multitude of dance styles.
L’amuse-danse! / By Geneviève Charras – August 24, 2024
https://genevieve-charras.blogspot.com/2024/08/montpellier-danse-2024-traces-et-signes.html
A dance festival leaves footprints, traces, sends out signs and ricochets into “the lake” that Jean Cocteau said should never be dried up.
Danceclub
Michèle Murray surprises with “Dancefloor” at the Théâtre de l’Agora. In the company of dancers from the CCN Ballet de Lorraine (directed by Petter Jacobsson), in the evening twilight, as the dancers gradually take over the various levels of the open-air theater. They appear from the top of the galleries, the natural light still changing at this miraculous hour. The white stage is bare: sobriety is required. Like free electrons, they dance, isolated, free gestures, alone. Classical pauses, all virtuosic and enthusiastic. Very Pasolinian duets unite them: beauty and singularity, intimate wildness and complicity. The lighting ambiances illuminate and magnify the whole. Like salvoes launched into space, they devour the space where they are in unison in a unique choreography. Between chorus and isolation, between classical vocabulary and contemporary inventiveness.