La danse est l’archéologue, ou une idole dans l’os

DD Dorvillier’s artistic practice oscillates between the exploration of the sensitive body and more conceptual approaches to composition and improvisation. She seeks to encourage autonomy in the reception and transmission of her work. The relationship with sound, light, and objects, as almost linguistic materials, is often a driving force. At present, how and where to dance, and how and why to preserve dance–how these conditions influence each other–are key questions in her research. To bring out a dance situated in the here and now, she delves into the sediments of memory and its landslides: from place to place, she moves the memory of the gestures, people, and stones that have moved her. She dances the earth to the bone, until perhaps she finds a piece of carved wood, a primitive idol, a small piece of presence.

Her new solo, created in collaboration with sound artist Sébastien Roux and researcher and filmmaker Mathieu Bouvier, is structured around four successive dance scores. These scores emerged from a dream, after practice sessions in the studio, location scouting, and research on archaeological dig sites. The dancer dances by digging through the series of scores and once she reaches the end, she starts again. The sound recorded during her first round of dancing returns to accompany the second –a ghost of sound that combines the present with the immediate past as she moves into the future.