PRESS
TIME, 2024
Dansercanalhistorique.fr / By Philippe Verrièle — June 14, 2024 / Festival Tours d’Horizons — CCN Tours
https://dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=content/time-de-michele-murray-tours-d-horizons/
With TIME, Michèle Murray affirms her filiation with American abstract dance in a masterful piece.
…Very well structured according to a logic of the performers’ accumulations and de-accumulations, TIME can be considered an abstract piece. An empty stage, inhabited by large expanses of frank color with slightly hazy borders, enhanced by Catherine Noden’s lighting, signals a certain inspiration à la Mark Rothko (1903–1970), albeit less systematic. As soon as two dancers enter from the back, the absence of narrative intent becomes clear. They move forward. They move to the back of the stage. A diagonal in strict unison and moving frontstage. Succession of highly elaborate choreographic patterns, marked by the internal fluidity of movement until a standstill; then a new pattern begins, strongly differentiated from the previous one. The gesture blends into this construction, leaving plenty of room for pattern development without allowing the flow of movement to establish itself (unlike Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, for example)…
DANCEFLOOR, 2024, extended version with the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine – commissioned work
Ouvert aux publics / By Laurent Bourbousson – July 6,2024
[VU] Montpellier Danse : ATK et Michèle Murray, deux grandes chorégraphes
Montpellier Danse : ATK 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.
Michèle Murray offers Ballet de Lorraine a breathtaking DANCEFLOOR.
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 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 desire 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.
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.
…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, vibrating, without ever losing the beauty, both superior and interior, of each person in his or her dancing singularity, twirling, statuesque or simply alive…
…Dancefloor makes you want to renew the experience, yes, we should certainly come back…
Lokko.fr / By Gérard Mayen – July 7, 2024
Michèle Murray et Dimitri Chamblas : un festival des Américains.e.s de Montpellier
Michèle Murray and Dimitri Chamblas: a festival of Montpellier Americans
On stage on July 2 and 3, in a piece that perhaps stretched out too far over a full hour, we were intoxicated by an incessant game of furtive stage entrances, unfolding a great mist of molecular body presences. Movement emerges from the top, with aquiline accents. The spectator’s eye is never captured by an obligatory motif. The multiple and the diverse never cease to pulsate, in a wave of individual scores (not to be confused with egos or characters). In the course of the patterns, wisps and flashes, a whole universe takes shape in an uplifting movement, all the more powerful for the fact that it only very fleetingly consents to unison.
Having reached such a degree of elegant vibration, one can only think that ten meters away, in another courtyard of the Agora, Cunningham’s ashes were scattered after his death. This is the America of references.
DANCEFLOOR, 2023 / creation with the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine
L’œil d’Olivier / By Olivier Frégaville Gratian d’Amore – April 3, 2023 / The Ballet de Lorraine in its diversity
…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.
Danses avec la plume / By Claudine Colozzi – April 7, 2023 / Ballet de Lorraine : Michèle Murray and Adam Linder
…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 lights 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.
Dansercanalhistorique.fr / By Marjolaine Zurfluh – April 1, 2023
https://dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=content/le-programme-2-du-ccn-ballet-de-lorraine
(Adam Linder and Michèle Murray…) … With this high-quality program and a top-notch cast, the Ballet de Lorraine once again demonstrates its excellence and wins over the audience.
Sceneweb.fr / By Belinda Mathieu – April 5, 2023
https://sceneweb.fr/adam-linder-et-michele-murray-deux-creations-pour-le-ballet-de-lorraine/
(Michèle Murray) 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.
EMPIRE OF FLORA, 2022
Toute la Culture | By Gerard Mayen – July 2, 2022
https://toutelaculture.com/spectacles/danse/lumineuse-tenacite-de-michele-murray-a-montpellier-danse/
Michèle Murray’s luminous tenacity at the Montpellier Dance festival
Intelligence of composition and intelligence of the dancers’ performance skills illuminate EMPIRE OF FLORA, a new piece by the Montpellier-based choreographer.
…EMPIRE OF FLORA seems magnificently mastered, at the height of compositional intelligence. But at the same time, this intelligently thought-out composition results in a simple luminous and light texture.
…Returning to Merce Cunningham, we remember some of his thoughts, and his saying, in substance, that he prefers deploying devices on stage that allow the beauty of the world to reveal itself, and not to try to impose forms supposed to represent beauty. This is what we feel in EMPIRE OF FLORA, which is due to a delicate intelligence of the performing of the dance (also due to the specific way choreographer Michèle Murray has of directing the dancers, underlining the great trust that characterizes the artistically very mature relationship between these four young men and herself).
OFFSHORE MAGAZINE / By Jean Paul Guarino – July 2022
Décidemment une éclectique programmation, et c’est tant mieux – Montpellier Danse 2022, suite
After creating her successful dance piece WILDER SHORES in 2020, Michèle Murray creates EMPIRE OF FLORA and testifies of her still strong attachment to choreography as an art form as well as to a respectful emancipation towards its history.
There are also moments of rest, so as to avoid any narrative, and in order to stick with the subject, namely dance, once again. Right until the end, the dancers, mastering and restraining their bodies, – bodies which are subjected to a choreographic composition that seems to have no syntax, but its own effervescent logic, – , the dancers will resist the exuberance and the vital lyricism of the musical whirlwind, so as to better impose their own power, until the stage backlight, until nightfall.
I rarely linger on technical aspects nor on individuals, but I would like to point out once again, in this new choreography as in her former one, the refined lighting of Catherine Noden, the quality of DJ Lolita Montana’s set, and the improbable tender feeling induced by these four strange dancers seemingly appearing from who knows where.
RES MUSICA MAGAZINE / July 2, 2022, by Delphine Goater / Montpellier Danse, clubbing or not clubbing
https://www.resmusica.com/2022/07/02/montpellier-danse-version-clubbing-or-not-clubbing/
Two stages, two atmospheres, both reminiscent of clubbing and partying, at Montpellier Danse, with Ohad Naharin’s creation «2019» for the Batsheva Dance Company and the performance EMPIRE OF FLORA, by Michele Murray.
… Four very good dancers, four different masculinities on the bare stage. With a sustained attention to each gesture, a quality of movement and a feline energy, the four dancers test themselves, confront each other, compare themselves, as in a fashion show. Next to them, the DJ mixes a set whose intensity increases and then decreases. There is a certain vanity in this fascinating parade of male appearances, from the pose to the posture. But Michèle Murray does not fall into the trap, concentrating on movement alone, in an imperturbable objectivity.
Spintica Magazine / By Marie Reverdy – July 2022
After WILDER SHORES presented during the 41st edition of the Montpellier Danse festival, Michèle Murray continues her work inspired by artist Cy Twombly’s paintings.
…The piece abounds in choreographic details, inscribed in the bodies and in space. Dazzling references seem to emerge from the vivacity of the bodies. Everything seems to be planned as much as fortuitous, like the definition of life given by Jacques Monod, born between “chance and necessity”. There is something jubilant in this piece, something delightful. Spring has no landscape, it has no smell, it has no face, it is a contradictory state, situated somewhere between power and grace…
WILDER SHORES, 2020
Dansercanalhistorique.fr / By Thomas Hahn – September 2020
Montpellier Danse 40bis : Creation of WILDER SHORES by Michèle Murray
https://dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=content/montpellier-danse-40bis-creation-de-wilder-shores-de-michele-murray
… WILDER SHORES distinguishes itself by absolute rigor, implacable precision and infallible discipline.
In their seemingly random crossings of the stage, individuals observe and meet each other, face to face or in parallel, and tune in to one another, during the time needed to charge oneself with shared energy, and then to set off again towards new human adventures. And it works!
Offshore Revue / By Jean Paul Guarino – September 24, 2020 / Montpellier Danse 40 Bis
Nous y étions, en y étiez-vous ? Montpellier Danse 40 Bis / septembre 2020
… The title of the piece, a hint towards the choreographer’s work methods, was chosen above all in order to boost her choreographic writing, and to dig deeper into her demanding artistic course. And it works! …
… everything works towards enforcing the expressions of silhouettes, of the bodies, and of dance. If in this “first part”, we noted the energy and charisma of a certain Jimmy Somerville – the dancer Baptiste Menard in fact – , during the “second part”, a superb dancer duo took place – performed by Marie Leca and Alexandre Bachelard.
…The whole choreography states that this isn’t a duet, and that these two aren’t a couple either, but instead reveals how 1 + 1 in fact equals 1. Because it was him, because it was her. It’s beautiful…
L’œil d’Olivier / By Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore – September 23, 2020
… A unique choreographic style.
Clothed in black costumes contrasting with the white, immaculate floor, six dancers invade the space. Entering one after the other, disappearing at will, coming back to haunt the stage, they do not keep still. A solo, a duet, each dancer follows his own score. Bodies gauge each other, look for each other and then ignore each other. There is nothing linear about Michèle Murray’s writing. It consists of a multitude of words linked together by a strict grammar. Michèle Murray, who studied at Merce Cunningham’s studio in New York, is interested in movement for movement’s sake. She has one movement following another, at times even overrunning each other. Her choreographic prose, although formal, is abundant…
ATLAS / STUDIES, 2018
Tanzweb.org / By Klaus Dilger – April 2024
ATLAS / STUDIES, an exciting, high-quality creation closing the 2024 edition of the INTO THE FIELDS festival in Bonn, Germany.
Dansercanalhistorique.fr / By Gérard Mayen – June 2018
Montpellier Danse : « Atlas / Studies » by Michèle Murray
https://dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=content/montpellier-danse-atlas-etudes-de-michele-murray
With a wonderful cast, in an ideal setting, the choreographer composes an atlas of knowledge and mischief, fully in touch with the zeitgeist…
…Following the principle of inventive relaunch with each new study, the performance is often captivating, at times exhilarating. Each study is an opportunity for reshuffling the cards, constantly rethinking and reimagining new combinations, interrelational modes, observational skills and sharing of energy levels.
…It is quite impossible to recount the abundance of motifs, situations, and techniques performed by these dancers. A playful intelligence emanates from this composition, as well as giving us the opportunity to enjoy the very different and affirmed physical and moral personalities at play.
In these studies, one finds the spirit of our current zeitgeist in a contemporary performance. The viewer is often kept on the edge of his seat.
Lise OTT / Montpellier Danse — June 2018
…As independent pieces coexisting with various musical compositions, including those of composer Gerome Nox, they are the result of a rigorous and inventive improvisational process, capable of reshuffling the cards of modernity and emancipating themselves from any academism. Pieces to enjoy and experience, they paint the atlas of a choreographer engaged in a never-before-seen marathon of pure dance, full of energy and joy.