Simultaneous Translation
"Regarding Vincent, I love the mobility of his torso, the immensity of his arms that serve his expressive hands, his bewitching look, I love the way his dances resemble a story. Regarding Takeshi, I love his blazing speed, his indescribable mimetic ability, his cunning pupils that pierce the mask of his face, and the precaution that accompanies each gesture and intention. And regarding the two of them, I love their smiles, their so different smiles.
To speak to someone who doesn’t share the same language, I entrust myself to an interpreter and I listen to his echo like the song of my voice. The confidence in the translation of the following gestures is primordial, a little like acknowledging that three sounds can be associated with the same letter, or conversely that the same sound can be transcribed differently. Because our bodies are different and so are our tongues, like our images or our dreams. So it is with our presence and our incarnations. There is no need to look for a similarity. The only veritable one is that we dance, and the desire to dance together was there.
May the three of us keep our exoticism in the eyes of the others.”
Michel Kelemenis
Echos
Taktik Delphine Huetz
jun.1999
My 1st danced with Bagouet, frequented the international scene before coming back to Marseille where his creations dug in and took hold. The choreographer’s disturbing sensibility always surfaces in his writing and isn’t ashamed of its soulful fidelity to the neo-classical heritage. And he has fun with it, like with his Dormeuse du Val that borrows its nostalgic breath from Rimbaud, its bucolic inspiration fading into an intimate dream. My 2nd pursued his dance in Japan with intense theatricality forged through contact with the most important American post-modernist schools. Vertiginous geometries where all antagonisms seem to vanish. The energy tends to excess, yet is surrounded on all sides by the serene mastery of gesture ; expressionism seems to have become the second nature of the purest minimalism. His solo refers to a delimited and measured space, like all rooms in Japan, in tatami : the choreographer’s room.
My 3rd drew some contours of contemporary African dance. This choreographer is literally inhabited and permeated by the original and ancestral breath of a trance, the animal reign capable of flight.
My all ends with the joint proposal by 3 exceptional dancers : Michel Kelemenis, Takeshi Yazaki and Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe, a beautiful interplay of 3 languages, each exploring an intricate pathway that reveals the inexhaustible pleasure they experience dancing together.