Sylphides

The Sylphides (Sylphs) are mythical creatures, symbols of beauty, intermediaries between the living and the dead whose diaphanous appearance has been a source of fascination to writers and choreographers, inspiring several ballets, including the one by Michel Fokine danced by Vaslav Nijinsky. This source serves to both dress up bodies and to make a radical break with its classical point of reference. Indeed, like Pâquerette, Sylphides is above all a choreography of the possibility of movement – of its revelation, its advent. A choreography in which movement is not a given but the result of a journey, an experience that gives rise to a new organism, new possibilities of inhabiting it and making it move. The metaphorical power of this work no doubt stems from the paradoxes that it reveals with regard to the very idea of dance: sealed in black latex sacks, where moving and breathing are restricted to a vital minimum, the performers display vulnerable, lethargic bodies; all that remains visible is the rhythmic breathing that shapes the latex like a second skin. Pure sculptural images, vitrified vanities in a sort of fictional eternity, they become surfaces upon which various images are projected: mortury mask, futuristic mummies evoking interstellar travellers, as well as a strange sado-masochistic ceremony.

The process to which they subject their bodies with their hypnotic plasticity symbolises a sloughing, a transmutation that is both physical and metaphysical. A ceremony of passage and parable of renewal, from inertia to movement, Sylphides marks a threshold in the work of Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud: a zone of transit towards another form of dance, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

Recorded at the CND on March 16, 2017