Through a collage of intimate tableaux in which performed actions mix with documentary scenes, the five dancers use their bodies and the song that traverses them to evoke current social issues. And if the sum of the parts was greater than the whole?
That everyone in his class liked him too… And that sometimes she had a hard time understanding the expectations of others. TBB, Yverdon, Through their bodies and voices the performers strive to examine the varying impacts that different current social issues have upon them.
The piece aims to indulge in the luxury of nuance and complexity that the realities of the daily struggle for survival or human dignity often render impossible. A sensitive experience rather than a manifest one, the piece is an attempt to keep intact an ensemble of contradictions and paradoxes without necessarily trying to resolve them. For the audience, the distinction between the centre of the stage and the sidelines is blurred; they have just as much access to the dancers when they are consciously performing in the centre of things as when they seem to forget themselves, or at least forget that they are still visible in margins.
At different moments the performers come together like an awkward Greek chorus, looking for the possibility of harmony without always achieving it. They embrace the dissonance as much as the euphoric unisons. Through its ensemble of heteroclite performers and their actions the stage, the piece offers up a space in which we as audience members can confront ideas or actions that we may find disturbing and thus puts us in an uncomfortable position rather than comforting us in our certitudes.
If the piece begins by a clear and binary invitation to judge the propositions made on stage, the repetition and accumulation of examples finally encourages a re-questioning of the solidity of our own judgements. Fragments of text - non-exhaustive lists, monologues or awkward attempts at speech — punctuate the piece and lead to such questions as: How can one speak of the other?
