15.05, 17 — 20.05.2022
Everything in Castélie Yalombo’s choreography is unstable. She is alone on stage, but her body seems to be manipulated from the outside. Her movements are disjointed: suddenly, with her eyes closed in front of a basin of water, she shapes her limbs and movements as if her body is guided by conflicting forces. With this performance, Yalombo creates a choreography of rare power. Starting from the relationship with her own identity – born in Belgium to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father – she undertakes what she defines as her odyssey in the space of a mixed identity. In front of the audience, her body is crossed by various historical references, but they dissolve every time to claim a singularity more complex than fixed categories. She moves in a space surrounded by clay sculptures, whose colours evoke different tones of skin, while the forms bring to mind a body’s matter before it takes shape, before it is enclosed in a distinct identity. She moves between one image and another in a unique, hypnotic fashion until she becomes a clown, the only figure authorized to speak outside the box. After graduating from ISAC and working as an interpreter for Louise Vanneste, Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives marks Yalombo’s first appearance at the festival. It is an ode to ambiguity from a rising voice in Belgian choreography.
Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives
How many people here are wearing blue?
What is there between your eyelids and your eyes?
Perhaps only your eyes.
But are they open?
Where do they start opening?
Is it from the back of the inside of your head or the back of the outside of your head?
When did they start opening? Can they open more?
How many people here have bruises?
You won’t see anything if you don’t close your eyes.
Where am I if I’m not in my body?
And what is this body a trace of?
Where is Africa when it remains outside history?
Do you see this invisible monument there, in the middle?
*
Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives explores the underlying friction of a prioris of our perceptions of racialised female bodies.
Crossing / crossed by a continuum of shapes, of figures linked to representations of Black History and of its own imaginings of the black body.
Water’s body is a hanging, lost object, between the ‘how to be seen’ and the ‘how to be expressed’.
- Castélie Yalombo, April 2022
Presentation: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Charleroi danse
Choreography: Castélie Yalombo | Musician: Loucka Ellie Fiagan | Sound spatialization: Lucie Grésil | Ceramics, scenography: Sophie Farza | Dramaturgy: Jean Lesca | Coach clown: Anna Kuch | Assistant choreography: Anja Rottgerkamp
Production, tour: AMA – France Morin, Cécile Perrichon | In collaboration with: Kunstenwerkplaats | Coproduction: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Charleroi danse, Atelier 210, KWP Kunstenwerkplaats, Rising Horses
With the support of: Kunstencentrum BUDA, KWP Kunstenwerkplaats, Studio Etangs Noirs, Rising Horses, Les Brigittines, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Service général de la Création artistique