Arise

A creation by Christian and François Ben Aïm and Piers Faccini

A dialogue between dance and music intended for sacred or atypical  places, Arise is a piece that will reinvent and remodel itself according  to the spaces it occupies.

Arise is based on a sensitive approach to the notions of solitude and  elevation. A poetic performance of sobriety to better reveal what is  most alive in each of us. This deployment addresses the notion of the  sacred and seeks to propose an approach that oscillates between  religiosity and the pagan dimension.

The piece takes the form of a dialogue with Piers Faccini, a refined  author-composer-performer who signs a sparse and bewitching music. The  piece, which is fundamentally evolving, has entered into an intimate  resonance with the Sainte-Chapelle, a majestic building, both imposing  and soothing, chosen as the place of creation – the project being called  upon thereafter to circulate and to be (re)modelled in other spaces.

If the piece is an invitation to meditation, it also tends to  experience the opposite movement: that of openness, which borders on the  search for a transparency that Tommy Pascal was able to magnify in a  film: I remember saying goodbye. Thanks to the subtle eye of  the director, inhabited by the expression of the body in movement, the  relationship to music as a link between dance, heritage sites and  in-situ routes is highlighted.

For more than twenty years, Christian and François BEN AÏM have been building a work rich of poetry and high standards, fraternal bond and singularity.

At the end of a multidisciplinary training combining dance, physical theater and circus, each one follows his path as a performer, then the two brothers meet to create À l’abri du regard des hommes, avant d’aller mourir ailleurs, a hybrid dance-theater piece which marks the beginning of their collaboration in 1997. Twenty pieces will follow which anchor their fieldwork as much as they travel internationally. They draw their inspiration from literary, musical and pictorial sources, and intimately mixing artistic disciplines on the stage : En plein coeur (2006), Valse (2010), The Ogresse on archives and her dog (2011), Lightness of Storms (2014), Burn, rebellious hearts (2017), Mirages — boreal souls (2018), Arise (2019), JESTS (2021).

Marked by an uncompromising energy, summoning the performer to an intimate relationship with movement, the dance of the BEN AÏM brothers offers, beyond a speech, an experience, a "crossing" that the dancer performs in front of our eyes, that he lives each time with the sincerity of a full and entire presence.

With this demanding writing comes an art of composition which gives birth to the stage an imagination borrowing from dreams, from the marvelous of the tale and from invisible realities. Through a subtle effect of empathy, the audience enters an unstable world, where everything is the object of poetic questioning - a world to be experienced together.

Calendar of creations

2021

JESTS

2019

Snapshots - A series femal solos

Arise

2018

Mirages — Boreal souls

2017

Brûlent nos coeurs insoumis (Burn, rebellious hearts)

2016

Peuplé, dépeuplé (Inhabited, uninhabited)

2014

La légèreté des tempêtes

2013

La forêt ébouriffée (The Dense Forest)

L'orée des visages

Karma

2011

L'Ogresse des archives et son chien

2010

Valse en trois temps

Résistance au droit

2008

Louves

Amor fati fati amor

2007

You're a bird, now!

2006

En plein coeur

2004

Carcasses, un oeil pour deux

2003

Ne vous fiez pas au titre, il peut encore changer

2001

Ô my brother !

La Frontera

1999

Un homme en marche

L'enfant du miroir

1998

L'homme rapaillé

1997

A l'abri du regard des hommes, avant d'aller mourir ailleurs

Obsessed with the expression of bodies in motion, Tommy has been  devoting himself to direction since 2007. He was a professional dancer  for 18 years (Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Ballet Preljocaj, ...).