“Illustration and animation have always occupied a place of their own in my pieces, as these works contain secrets, folds revealing the extraordinary and the extravagant.
Animation films capture, in my opinion, the magic of movement. They feel somehow very similar to choreographic work. Chaos, diversity, that all of the sudden, through play and game, take shape, as heteroclite bits come together. in animation cinema, like in all of my choreographic research, poetic reality comes to life as we oppose realities through editing and metaphors.
Chroeographic writing, for me, always comes from the body, hence the need to forge ties and work with individuals, each of whom contains their own animal-like language. In this ‘weakness’ and this letting go, something that is fully and thoroughly honest happens, something that gathers the contradictions and the motions of incoherence that exist within each individual being.
For this production, I drew inspiration from animation film “Tales of Tales”, a jewel that I stumbled upon about ten years ago, and that touches me profoundly. The point of this work wasn’t reproducing Yuri Norstein’s aesthetics, but using this film as a source that opens the door for the construction of something else. It’s the film’s poetic dimension that interested me, as a radical and intransigent manifestation of being and thinking the world.
What emerged is a six-dancer piece about memory, layered like the structure of our own conscience. A tale that, instead of through a classical narrative thread, is built in that space between poetical images and physical virtuosity, one encounter and one fugitive impression at a time. Ravishing audiences, “Lichens” defies our preconceptions and reveals a world – ours, perhaps – that, through illusion, derision and hardship calls for constant reinventing.”
Karine Ponties
