Premieres of bal.exe: 20 and 21 march in Caen, then from 28 march to 6 april in Paris

For her seventh creation, Anne Nguyen—who has been awarded the 2013 Nouveau Talent Chorégraphie SACD prize—restages eight popping specialists, this time to chamber music played on stage by five classical musicians. She has devised two completely dissimilar anachronistic balls. In the first ball, which captures the 2014 spirit, the dancers are like wax dolls cast aside in a night club, springing to life spasmodically in a jerky, exuberant dance to the music of Connesson, Bach and Biber performed by solist musicians. They return for the second ball in the guise of bizarre onlookers to witness the performance of Brahms’s quintet for clarinet and strings (opus 115). Inspired to move by the melancholy, bewitching music, they interact with each other with jerky, restrained and mechanical gestures, moving like robots, sketching out a few dance steps in the process. bal.exe could be the name of a computer program installed in the memories of these somnambulistic dancers, a program prompting the dancers to automatically execute their movements in pairs. A specialist in the art of deconstructing hip-hop dance, Anne Nguyen revisits the art of social dancing, and creates a new ‘mechanical’ hip-hop dance style performed in pairs, called “lopping pop”. In bal.exe, the dancers’ robotic, electrified movements are perpetually at odds with the liberating or interactive notions of conventional dance. bal.exe refers to the intuitive and emotional memories of “beauty”, of dancing and of the body of the dancing partner. The eight solitary bodies are irresistibly drawn to the dance floor in their search for the pleasure of dancing for themselves or for their partner.