Sequences arranged in kaleidoscope fashion make up this tribute to the kiss: a naked man dances and then lies down, surrounded by bunches of grapes, like a Bacchus; images run over his skin like a caress; a body falls and breaks mirrors; an infant feeds from its mother’s breast… Following the rhythm of the famous song, a slow camera movement films the dreamlike world of Frédéric Gies and Frédéric de Carlo.

What are kisses made of? What memory, what dreams do they harbour? Such seem to be the questions of the two choreographers and interpreters. During the tableaux that shape this unusual fresco, the film moves away from the simple words of the song to reflect in terms of identity based on nudity, sensations and the most suppressed desires.

Source : Irène Filiberti

Frédéric Gies is an artist in the field of experimental dance, based in Stockholm. He is also a senior lecturer in choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts.

After dancing in the works of various French choreographers in the 90′s (Daniel Larrieu, Odile Duboc or Christophe Haleb for example), he started to develop his own work, which focuses on the articulation between dance, choreography and politics, and more precisely on how dance and choreography can address politics in a non-representational way. His pieces originate from rigorous movement research processes, which are informed by his experience in the field of somatic practices as well as in specific forms of contemporary dance, his former training in ballet and his participation in techno club and rave cultures. The dances he creates collapse in various ways the hierarchies and distinctions between different dance forms.

He creates his pieces alone or in collaboration with other choreographers (Anna Pehrsson, Jefta van Dinther, DD Dorvillier, Manuel Pelmus, Isabelle Schad, Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, and Odile Seitz) or with artists from other disciplines (Fiedel, Anton Stoianov, Daniel Jenatsch, Andrea Keiz, Gavin Young ). He has been one of the initiators of the collective Praticable. His piece Dance (Praticable), which premiered in Berlin in 2006, toured for ten years and was presented in fifteen countries.

Since 2012, he is head of the Master Programme in Choreography at DOCH–UNIARTS. There, between 2013 and 2017, he also developed a research project: Bad girls practices: un-writing dance, the body and the chorus.

His latest works are tightly connected to techno music and to his club and rave experiences. For all of them, he collaborates with Fiedel, Dj resident in Berghain as well as with the visual artist Anton Stoianov.  They are conceived as durational social gatherings with dance and techno music at their center, in which the audience is implicated in various ways. In 2016, he created together with Fiedel, Anton Stoianov and Thomas Zamolo the seven to ten hours performance Dance is ancient, which has been presented in Gothenburg and Stockholm in the frame of a five weeks event he organized also called Dance is ancient. In this frame, he also facilitated several sessions of his practice Technosomatics and exhibited his recent drawings.

Source : Frédéric Gies

More information :

http://fredericgies.com

Based on a simple principle, in the continuity of the collection Une Danse, le temps d'une chanson, Patrice Nezan proposes a series of seven short films, each bringing together a choreographer and a director. In these “choreogra-films”, music imprints its duration and atmosphere on each of the choreographic universes. Journeys to ephemeral worlds, the strangeness of which is due as much to the quality of the images as to the situations imagined.

It understands : Adesso basta !, Besame Mucho, Daïté, Erè mèla mèla, Garota de Ipanema, La Habanera, Ya Rayah.