Johann Sebastian Bach is certainly the most inspiring artist

to write screenplays.

Coline Serreau

 

For her Mozart Requiem, Estelle Danvers chose a stripped-down musical version, with a string quartet: in the absence of voices and orchestral colour, the choreographic gesture becomes a word.

With Be Bach, Estelle Danvers continues her choreographic research around movement and emotion.

 

Dance and gesture are powerful storytellers, revealers of passions, emotions and impulses. All the more so because they touch the unspeakable, the impalpable and thus sneak deep into the hearts of human beings. Who better suited than Bach to accompany this quest, he who worked tirelessly to transcribe into music a devotion that words were not enough to express?

 

In Be Bach, Estelle Danvers recreates a microcosm where all social behaviors within a group bubble. Each character expresses their personality and confronts it with the others, alternately manipulative and manipulated, gentle, cruel, perfidious or naive. Beneath the apparent confidence, Estelle probes the fragilities, the carefully hidden flaws. It is thus a mirror that she holds up to us, inviting us to question our own behaviors.

 

With an energetic and brilliant dance, the characters make us believe that life is only a game and that Bach is not serious. They mask the weariness of a hollow life with the conformism of a codified society, where obligations and artifices take the place of substance and where insensitivity takes precedence over humanity.

From play to social representation, from small successes of esteem to humiliations, the dancers cross paths, oppose each other, reveal themselves. Between gravity and lightness, they embody our relational questions and underline at the same time, the absurdity of asking so many questions.

 

Are we having as much fun as we pretend to? Are we just a reflection of a mask we wear by convention? What do we show of ourselves and what do we want to hide at all costs? As busy as we are maintaining our own character, can we really create connections with others?

 

In this play, humor is very present! Sometimes light, sometimes grating, it rubs shoulders with melancholy and antipathy. Determined to go towards the light no matter what, Estelle definitively leads her characters to the side of play and fantasy with a lively finale, in a saving lightness.

 

Next residency : from October 28th to November 2nd, 2024 at the Marché de Lerme (Bordeaux)