“Stance II”, Catherine Diverrès' last solo, was written in 1997 and based on “La Terra di Lavoro”, a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini. After transmitting it once in 2001, it was performed again this year by Carole Gomes, who has danced almost all her works since 1996. So, onstage we see a lone dancer, barefoot and dressed in black, while Pasolini recites his text and the cello plays and rumbles in the background. The space opens, carved up by the lights and the shadows created by Marie-Christine Soma, which create an intense, melancholy universe. And the movements develop, broad, sculptural, mixing expressionism and abstraction. “Stance”, etymologically, means a poetic form. And it is this that the solo created by Catherine Diverrès invites us on: a voyage which has grace, of the gliding steps on stage, of the undulation of the arms, of the refinement of the gestures. An interior voyage which also involves the mental space of the spectator, who uses the fullness as much as the emptiness: “stance” also comes from Italian “stanza”, which means “remain/resting place” because there must be a complete meaning and a rest at the end of each stanza. A dark presence, luminous in her movement, Carole Gomes invites us to a mysterious ceremony, which calls as much on the forces of life as on the abyss which threatens us, inhabited by a deep inwardness. The dance unfolds, stripped bare, in the shadow of the black sun of melancholy.

Source: Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (International choreography encounters of Seine-Saint-Denis)

Updating: May 2012

Catherine Diverrès has said, “Conscience, our relationship with others, this is what creates time”, ever since her first choreographic creation. She is a sort of strange meteor, appearing in the landscape of contemporary dance in the mid-80’s. She stood out almost immediately in her rejection of the tenets of post-modern American dance and the classically-based vocabularies trending at that time. She trained at the Mudra School in Brussels under the direction of Maurice Béjart, and studied the techniques of José Limón, Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais before joining the company of Dominique Bagouet in Montpellier, then deciding to set out on her own choreographic journey.

Her first work was an iconic duo, Instance, with Bernardo Montet, based upon a study trip she took to Japan in 1983, during which she worked with one of the great masters of butoh, Kazuo Ohno. This marked the beginning of the Studio DM. Ten years later she was appointed director of the National Choreographic Center in Rennes, which she directed until 2008.

Over the years, Catherine Diverrès has created over thirty pieces, created her own dance language, an extreme and powerful dance, resonating with the great changes in life, entering into dialogues with the poets: Rilke, Pasolini and Holderlin, reflecting alongside the philosophers Wladimir Jankelevich and Jean-Luc Nancy, focusing also on the transmission of movement and repertoire in Echos, Stances and Solides and destabilising her own dancing with the help of the plastician Anish Kapoor in L’ombre du ciel.

Beginning in 2000, she began adapting her own style of dance by conceiving other structures for her creations: she improvised with the music in Blowin, developed projects based on experiences abroad, in Sicily for Cantieri, and with Spanish artists in La maison du sourd. Exploring the quality of stage presence, gravity, hallucinated images, suspensions, falls and flight — the choreographer began using her own dance as a means of revealing, revelation, unmasking, for example in Encor, in which movements and historical periods are presented. Diverrès works with the body to explore the important social and aesthetic changes of today, or to examine memory, the way she did in her recent solo in homage to Kazuo Ohno, O Sensei.

And now the cycle is repeating, opening on a new period of creation with the founding of Diverrès’ new company, Association d’Octobre, and the implantation of the company in the city of Vannes in Brittany. Continuing on her chosen path of creation and transmission, the choreographer and her dancers have taken on a legendary figure, Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, in Penthésilée(s). In returning to group and collective work, this new work is indeed another step forward in the choreographer’s continuing artistic journey.

Source: Irène Filiberti, website of the company Catherine Diverrès

More information: compagnie-catherine-diverres.com

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).