Rhodnie Désir continues its documentary approach with MWON’Da particularly accomplished work, on which she has been working for several years and which aims to offer a new perspective to the urgent and crucial issue of climate change.
To “solve the equation of the catastrophe”, to reflect on the climatic upheavals, but also on the evolution of the human race and its inscription in a temporality which exceeds it, the choreographer and creator Rhodnie Désir questioned various experts: astrophysicist, botanist, mycologist, water specialist, entomologist, volcanologist…
From these meetings, the winner of the Grand Prix de la danse in 2020 for her project BOW’T TRAIL and first artist associated with Place des Arts drew the material for this new creation which offers a new and quite unexpected perspective on the environmental crisis. Because the media and scientists have hammered the urgency in our ears, humans seem unable to take action to counter the acceleration of climate change, no doubt blinded by the short horizon of their own existence.
To get out of this impasse, the designer worked on bringing to life a language inspired by the slower rhythm of nature, pulsing with the rhythm of centuries and millennia, where humanity could find an intimate space, rather than didactic, to dialogue differently with the universe he inhabits. The title, MWON’Dderives its etymological roots from Creole – mon (” human “), anmwe (“cry of distress”), mwen (“me”) – and from the French word “monde”.
KEVIN CALIXTE PHOTO PROVIDED BY AGORA DE LA DANSE
An aluminum film is used to open the conversation between body and matter.
Conversation between body and matter
Five performers (Elisabeth-Anne Dorléans, Aurélie Ann Figaro, Jessica Gauthier, Gregory “Krypto” Selinger, James Viveiro, all amazing) are born from an aluminum film, the central scenic object of the piece, from which they emerge crawling . This material, which is found both in a transformed state in our human lives (and can be used in particular as a survival blanket) and in its raw state in nature, becomes a character in its own right, both a bearer of fatality and renewal, tragedy and hope.
In a space ravaged by darkness where light sometimes pierces, the bodies begin a conversation with this translucent, shimmering, shimmering, undulating matter, with a hypnotic rustle. Manipulated by the performers or suspended from the ceiling by cables, it has a thousand faces, becomes mountain, ocean, beast, sky, clothing, shelter.
The organic sound environment, produced live by the musician Engone Endong, also participates in this conversation; enveloping, disturbing, vaporous, it modulates by integrating breath, pulsations, lapping of waters, rustlings of nature, songs of birds.
Newcomers gauge each other, observe each other, continue on their way. Tracing with their hurried steps the outline of the aluminum film stranded on the ground, they walk, make a sudden U-turn, run, losing their bearings, overcome by tremors, chaos catches up with them. Then, they advance and pose their glance crossed by the fright and the amazement on the public, without flinching. What do we do now?
Having once again become four-legged beasts, crawling insects or with disarticulated limbs, they move about in the shadows, gather in nooks and crannies, exchange secret pacts. Gregarious and nomadic, they are constantly migrating, vulnerable but resilient.
To ward off fate, to summon the divine, they alternately perform their own dance, their bodies carrying their muffled cry; foot shaking the earth, hand slammed against the wall, graceful acrobatic movements carrying the body in search of verticality, fragile balance that we try to restore…
The language of Rhodnie Désir is the one we will all speak soon. That of a blood-red twilight, of a leaden blanket that covers the world with its shadow. But this shimmering matter also carries within it the hope of a salvation, the premise of a transformation.
The hour is no less serious, here and now. Even the performance loses its codes, with an abrupt finale that brings us back to the starting point, without decorum, where the performers, joined at the front of the stage by Rhodnie Désir and the rest of the team, watch without flinching the public destabilized, seeming to carry this message in silence: there is no point in applauding, it is now necessary to act.
MWON’D
Rhodnie Désir / RD Creations
agora of danceUntil December 10