The landscape starts with a testing of body and senses, with the story, immediate or delayed of this testing. Going through a garden is always a journey, a succession of footsteps, gestures, prints, smells and sounds: it is a choreography which creates the landscape in which one inscribes one's own story in the stories of others.

Choosing of a garden as the reference space for dance and for the conception of a new work is to reconnect with its basic components: a place of human action, a world vision, a space where the movements of the occupants and those of nature interfere with each other. It is also to see and rediscover the analogies between its history and that of stage performance, as a garden is an experiment in staging, an attempt at sublimation. Its ambitions come close to those of a work of art.

This choreography is made up of successive visions transformed or renewed by the dynamic of the staging and the diversity of the environmental worlds, evoked by a video and musical creation. If the music and image explore the imagery of the garden and revisit the stages of its evolution, this is in order to invent new creative and critical spaces, given over to (the presence of the) dance. Resonating with the stimulation of sonic and visual spaces, the dancing body imagines itself to have a new presence and slips into different physical and compositional registers. So, by passing through this reference, a new type of project and experience is created. For it is via the theme of the garden that the idea of the staged performance is re-explored and put into perspective. It is certain that bringing together video, music and dance in the transposed stage setting of a gardening project, is to raise questions about the nature of their relationships, imagine new dialogues and experiment with their capacities to offer new ways of writing.”

Source: Hervé Robbe

Born in Lille in 1961. After studying architecture for a few years, Hervé Robbe set his sights on dance. He was principally trained at Mudra, Maurice Béjart's school in Brussels. He began his performing career dancing the neo-classical repertoire, then went on to work with various modern dance makers.

In 1987 he founded his company: le Marietta secret.

The course of his career is clearly founded on a constant renewal of his choreographic writing. Supported by loyal artistic collaborators, his work has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, associating the dance presence with visual, sound and technological worlds. His projects, polysemic works, take many forms: frontal performance, ambulatory shows and installations.

The place of the audience, its presence and view is decisive; the stage space is regularly called into question.

His arrival at the CCN (National choreographic Centre) of Le Havre Haute-Normandie offered more opportunities for his research.

In 1999 he composed his autobiographical solo Polaroïd. Within it, video images of places associated with his childhood appear and coexist with an uninterrupted physical display.

In 2000 he explored the theme of home with Permis de construire – Avis de Démolition, a diptych consisting of an installation and a performance. He went on to tackle the theme of the garden in 2002 with Des Horizons Perdus.

In a world constructed with screens – virtual containers for the body, evokers of death – in the duet REW he engaged in a dialogue between man and woman on the theme of suicide. In 2004, with the group piece Mutating Score, he returned to the idea of the performance area being a common space occupied by both audience and dancers. This installation-dance, while reaffirming this conviction about the force of movement, marks the culmination of a project on the use of new technologies, which are integrated into the show in real time.

In 2006 he designed the installation So long as baby...love and songs will be, a kind of manifesto of the preoccupations which underlie his work. The device is a containing structure in which the audience is invited to watch and listen to the dancer-singers present on screen. Hervé Robbe distanced himself from the stage with this, then returned to it in the works Là, on y danse in 2007 and Next days in 2010.

While maintaining his personal approach in his own productions, he regularly accepts commissions from the Opéra de Lyon, the Gulbenkian Ballet, the CNSMDP (Paris Conservatoire) and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Source: Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre Haute-Normandie