“(...) There are diagonals, unisons, guns, stretching metal springs, sliding boxes and pistons, suddenly appearing screws and dowels, turns, and turning cogwheels. Time is counted, a precise mechanism is set in motion and let loose. It's about disrupting the performance by confronting the dancers with movements which never seem to want to stop.

It is a story of presence, the presence of two dancers, Alexandre Da Silva and Simon Nemeth, and of a mechanical corps de ballet. Original scenic sculptures, conceived by the visual artist Dominique Blais, create a dance of materials. These objects, given sound by Damien Mingus, are crafty. But this poetic machinery is a human story: a smile, a fall or an inclination can lead it astray.”

Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau

Further information

Website of the company

Updating: June 2013

Choreographer, performer and researcher of dance, Geisha Fontaine began her career as a ballet dancer, then trained under Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais in New York and Hideyuki Yano in Paris. She then set up the centre de danse contemporaine (Centre for Contemporary Dance) Le Dansoir in Toulouse and worked as a dancer for several contemporary dance companies. In 1998, she founded the Mille Plateaux Associés dance company with Pierre Cottreau. She was the winner of the Villa Médicis – Hors les murs residence in Japan in 2010.

Awarded her art PhD from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Geisha Fontaine was published by the Centre national de la danse (National Dance Centre) in 2004 (a book which has been translated into Spanish and Japanese), while “Tu es le danseur”, 2008 and “Là”, 2009, were published by Micadanses. She has collaborated on several joint publications, notably those published by CNRS. She is invited regularly as an artist and a researcher to various universities in France and abroad (Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Santiago…).

Further information

Mille plateaux associés website

Updated : june 2013

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.).