Corbeaux

Out of the darkness gloomy and silent silhouettes emerge. They stop. Then start to move again in a geometrical and alchemical device. Finally they come to a halt to embark on a performance that combines something of a trance and the intermittent roaring of female wildcats, in which the hypnotic swaying motion is reminiscent of animals in motion, of confined females that mankind likes so much to display.

But Corbeaux is something else too: it is the essential expression of femininity, its spawning power, supremacy that has the art of giving life bestowed on it. Corbeaux gives life to a female Gregorian chant. Haunting and worrying, it takes away your status as an onlooker to give you the more gratifying status as a spectator of your own intimacy. You are elsewhere. They are too. Higher, near the Light from which their bodies seem to flee, close to a cathartic other world where they ask us to join them.

Together, we – them and us – visit our outer limits, those of our conceptions, of our coming into the World, raised together towards this Mother-Light before returning, dazzled and shaking for ever, towards our dark lives as men standing upright.

Corbeaux is therefore a variation of something of which Bouchra Ouizguen is fond: origin, feeling, a Connection, connection to the Mother, connection to the Earth, connection to Love. Through the intervention of a contrived brutality, the choreographic intensity is just fragility and suggestion. It marks out the relationship between seeing and being seen, erasing the boundaries to return to what is essential: being there. Together.

Then, dislocated, cataleptic, the silhouettes leave us. Bigger. More sure of our own uncertainties to return to the darkness: black birds.