Dance scenes after motifs by Marguerite Duras

Spots, lanes, and squares of light create an image of a seemingly unending stage. Glowing blue in the prevailing twilight, only a wall limits the stage’s infinity. It is this wall which the men and women want to scale; angrily they leap its face, refuge-seeking they lean against it. The wall becomes a focal point, it indicates the inherent limits which eventually everyone must face by himself.

Strung on a chain of eleven scenes, and after consultations with the French author Marguerite Duras, Philippe Saire created fascinating, brand-new movements. Not dogmatic books but their themes and spirits prompted Saire to an uninhibited interpretation. Just like Marguerite Duras, Saire shows exactly how, and not why, something happens.

Now 79 years of age, Marguerite Duras became famous not only through the film version of her »Hiroshima mon amour« novel but also through her autobiographical, scandalising book »L’amant« (»The Lover«) for which she received the 1984 Parisian Prix Goncourt.

»Nouvelles« music consists of Jean-François Bovard’s original composition for two violins, violoncello, trombone and drums, an arrangement of greatest importance for the structure and mood of the performance.

Philippe Saire is a fully qualified professional dancer who used to perform in Paris and who, until now, created fifteen choreographies. In 1986 he started his own company which presently is one of the best and most interesting Swiss dance groups. The group performs mainly in French-speaking Lausanne and its neighbouring Morges. It also makes frequent guest appearances on leading European and American dance stages and, now, for its first times makes an appearance in Germany’s eastern provinces.

»The excitement of the semi-darkness embracing stage and audience mounts quickly, the dance performance hypnotises … Between man and woman nothing remains forever hidden, each passions remains yearning. Only love and death come to touch. Philippe Saire touches his way amazingly close to Marguerite Duras« (tanz international, Köln, 6/1993).