a poetic dance in suspension to promote Ambronay Abbey

For around ten years, the medieval abbey of Ambronay, in Ain, known for its festival of ancient and baroque music, has no equal for discovering and appreciating its heritage: musical tours with live performances, theatrical creations, “crazy” visits… On these 2023 European Heritage Days on September 16 and 17, it is one of the buildings that welcomes visitors, the imposing and majestic Archives Tower, which we will not see from the same way. Its main facade becomes the playground of two suspended dancers.

Around twenty meters in complete verticality

The most recognizable vestige of the ancient castle built by the counts of Savoy between 1310 and 1312 in order to face the Delphino-Savoyard wars, the Archives Tower therefore loses somewhat of its austerity over the weekend. The white stone caressed by the sun welcomes the moving blue silhouettes of the dancers – Séverine Bennevault Caton and Violaine Garros – who, starting from the top of the tower, move, hanging on ropes or elastics, over around twenty meters in complete verticality up to the glacis, the lower flared part of the building.

The two bodies, positioned perpendicular to the facade, are launched into a coordinated dance, here a leap, there a pirouette, there again a giant step which seems to ignore gravity. They cross paths, approach or move away according to the movements of a tarantella or an Italian baroque tune played at the foot of the tower by Pierre-Louis Rétat’s Chiome d’oro ensemble. The magical moment leaves lovers of beautiful stones speechless and suddenly spectators of a performance outside of time and above ground.

Landmarks disrupted

“Suspended dancing upsets all the public’s points of reference”, explains choreographer Séverine Bennevault Caton, founder of the company A fleur d’airs, at the origin of the show. And this is what interests him: “it’s making the audience feel things that they can’t normally feel. In reality, like many choreographers, I seek to enrich people’s emotional range.” And “the aerobatics, the leap, the bounce” contribute to it.

But if the spectator has the sensation that the dancers are moving in weightlessness, it is in reality the opposite which occurs for the artists who themselves see their spatial environment disrupted. “We are completely confronted with gravity and, tilting everything 90°, we are always in a muscular struggle to give the illusion that we are walking on a wall as when we walk on the ground”.

Both very technical and infinitely poetic, the show is obviously not an improvisation. Trained at the Paris National Conservatory of Dance (CNSMDP) but evolving in suspended dance for around fifteen years, Séverine Bennevault Caton learned to write her performances quickly, because time is often limited. “I write the show based on the facade, because it can give me ideas and constraints, and based on the music which inspires the movements and forces me to follow a technical sequence of the apparatus through which to pass “.

In its own way, the dance show between heaven and earth will have made the stones speak as much as the music during the festival period, and enchanted an audience literally turned upside down.