Photograph: Nick Underwood
CONTACT
antoinefraval@gmail.com
contact.borboletas@gmail.com
SOLO WORK
DANIEL 2011
Based on Daniel Johnston’s The Story Of An Artist, this short piece is an attempt to blur, in a simple way, the songwriter’s world with that of fellow artists, who feel his words are still resonating with an awkward fragility.
Body and paper will translate literally, or not, some of these lyrics into French, a simple choreography will try to punctuate Jonhston's poetics.
THE IMMORTAL LOSING GAME 2007
The Immortal Losing Game is based and responds to the cult 60s TV show The Prisoner. It is a response to The Prisoner embodied in the unfolding of a famous chess game called The Immortal Losing Game, which took place in 1957.
Initially focusing on the themes of The Prisoner the performance will look at how to construct a system in which a performer has a purpose to exist. According to strict rules, the performer will only move when necessary. I will use the pattern of a chessboard for the performer to make the moves of a chess game called The Immortal Losing Game.
Attracted by themes from The Prisoner, I refer to the series very loosely to draw material relevant to my own practice today. My practice questions the notion of private/public space. We watch TV shows – they become a collective cultural experience; but one that is rarely shared in a public sense as TV is largely watched in private residential contexts. I am looking for ways to illustrate how my own experience of watching a TV show can be shared in the context of a public performance.
PREVIOUS PREVIOUS
DEER PARK
Something fundamentally untamed makes itself felt through 'years, years', something scary which stops us in our tracks and upsets our cosy nesting habits. It reminds us that there is a lot in us, knocking at the doors of perception and knowledge, that we know nothing about. We are made of countless others, of unmapped forests, of beasts and migratory birds. We exist on the edges of awareness, somewhere between the real and the imaginary: where it is night, always night.
Augusto Corrieri
“The existence of a European sensibility was beautifully realised in the most outstanding devised piece in the festival, See You Swoon... Allusive, hypnotic and made musical by rhythmic repetitions in many languages, the piece created by six international performers used dance, sound, amplified whispers, video, projected text and pot plants, not to tell a story, but to conduct a meditation on languor, language and loss... Not only had every word and image been carefully calculated, every movement was executed with consummate skill.”
The Sunday Times critic, Robert Hewison, writing on ‘See you swoon’; published in The Sunday Times, 07 APR 03.
The company was born in 2002 from the meeting of various international artists, all of whom were finishing their degree at Dartington College of Arts. The company soon developed a particular aesthetic and poetics, combining elements of dance-theatre with live and recorded music, the use of text, and low-fi technology. In the company’s first work, 'See you swoon', 5 performers are dressed in school uniforms, whilst a 6th is dressed as a cowboy; they move between fast and slow choreographies, interacting with small domestic plants, using moves lifted from films (especially from Goddard’s ‘Eloge de l’ Amour’), speaking in different languages. In the scene called ‘Tanzen’, the German performer falls repeatedly to the ground in the attempt to execute an athletic dance, crying “Scheise!” at every failed attempt; 2 other performers, both on microphones, comment on and translate the dance in their respective language: “Shit!”…”Merde!”
À l'eau le 8 février 2020 à l'Espace Aimé Moron, Juigné sur Loire
