German premier

Strange shapes slowly come into view out of the darkness. The eye has already adapted itself to night vision and so it is far more intensively aware of light and colours. The shapes do not appear to be as much real people as figments of the imagination who increasingly seize hold of the scene and almost hypnotically penetrate our innermost.

»I have kept my eyes closed for a long time just so that I could open them wider. Until now I believed that I could see but I saw nothing … Out of what darkness did we emerge? As I watched the dark night, light began to move slowly past me: facet by facet. Unfortunately always I move around and the light vanishes. Back and forth I paced through a visceral nightfall, a walk into the density of the room where dance needs only itself and a glance of others« (Mathilde Monnier).

Perhaps those thought of Mathilde Monnier could convey something about the poetry of her »Nuit« (»Night«) dance creation. The night carries many definitions within itself and real day time must be understood as the starting point of a journey during which senses are honed, unconscious becomes conscious and black is perceived as the most brilliant colour absolutely imaginable. Are not also relationships between people far stronger pronounced by nocturnal coldness in the glaring light than they are the darkness? A changing game between coincidence and decay, void and fear, essential and essence, between birthing glare and extinction.

Mathilde Monnier is considered as an exceptional individual in the French dancing scene. Taught above all by Viola Farber and Jean-François Duroure, she created compact experimental pieces. Those culminated in 1993 in the, after the ancient pattern written, »For Antigone« in a collision of European and African cultures. She directs the national choreographic centre in South French Montpellier since 1993 and in 1996 Mathilde Monnier was appointed honorary president of the »Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Bagnolet/Seine Saint-Denis«, a biennially occurring and most important international choreographic competition near Paris.