What Louise Vanneste choreographs is the entire space. With its vibrations, resonances and projections. It is something other than just directing moving bodies. It is more than that. It is more profound. And open. For spectators of atla, it is played out in a physical wandering by six perfomers, somewhere between a performance and an installation. Rather than being performed front on, a road opens up in the territory of the imagination.

The Belgian choreographer willingly mentions the effect of reading: how imagination is activated by a setting in motion, at the only source of the work of language. Initially, implicit in the title atla, is à travers les aulnes [through the alders]. Alders makes us think of the writer Michel Tournier. Atla? It also refers to an extensive geography of the world. Which takes us to that other masterpiece by the same author: Friday or the Other Island.

After twenty-eight years alone on an island, out of what solar and cosmic sensuality does Robinson weave his extreme experience of a relationship with the world that he needs to recreate? Friday joins him. This human otherness could establish the great return to a civilising option. Or not.

Through Friday, Robinson will end up accepting the call of a different world, will embrace this island. 

Atla is not at all a transcription of the novel for the stage. But atla is imbued with resonances of time and terrestrial vibrations, their elementary suggestions, in a whirling of the void and spacings, which allow the dance to deploy its power for philosophical adventure that is nevertheless so close to the gesture. 

Gerard Mayen

Text written for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis 2019

•••

Gérard Mayen holds a Master in Dance Studies from the University of Paris 8, and is a journalist, dance critic and author, publishing in the French specialized media. He is also a practitioner of the Feldenkrais method.