Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté
Disciplines
At the borders of dance, theater, image, and animated forms, the performances of Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté explore the murky areas of sensitivity and the contradictions that betray the complexity of our actions and behaviors.
Obsessions, confusion, sinuosities between disciplines, surprising crevices. The materials that Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté manipulate, treat, and diffract all have in common a disturbing strangeness. Since 1985, the creative duo has been imagining universes that play with borders. She is a dancer and choreographer, he is a director and playwright, their projects, alternately led and nourished by visual arts, music or silences, as much as by psychoanalysis, embrace the unexplored, sensitivity and the unconscious, while addressing our imagination.
Marie Baudet / 2018
PERFORMANCES
The New Hallucinations of Lucas Cranach the Elder (2024)
Inspired by the universe of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, the performance explores the troubled attitudes of characters haunted by the convulsive memory of a previous existence. Figures appear behind a trompe l'oeil wall punctured with windows, creating living tableaux in an atmosphere dominated by humor, eroticism, and the mystery of presence.
This is a complete re-creation of the piece, which premiered in January 1990 at the Theater De Synagoge in Tilburg (Netherlands) under the title De ultieme gevoelens van Lucas Cranach de Oude and toured for nearly 25 years in Europe.
Ophelia-s (2023)
Are all women potential Ophelias, subjected to the injunction to combine weakness and beauty to find their place in the world, to make themselves desirable, and thereby exist?
Four drowned women, taken from their own death, lying on the shore, seem to wake up. Gathered around a black body of water from which projected images seem to emerge, they will attempt to reconstruct the alleged suicide of Hamlet's tender fiancée. But it is their own faces they see in the water, each embodying in turn and sometimes to the point of pleonasm the images of femininity that float in our unconscious. And when they allow themselves to be trapped by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that sublimate the bound woman, it is to emerge together, alive and united.
The Back-Worlds (2021)
Escaped from the dawn of time, disheveled creatures plunge into our eyes as into a bottomless mirror.
They are the eternal survivors of History, the extravagant ones who have gone through pleasures and days, but also chaos, wars, and plagues. They appear and disappear, torn between attraction and restraint, emergences of scenes already lived and suddenly rediscovered desires.
The Back-Worlds cast a spectral light on moments of stupor and uncertainty that sometimes accompany human passions and where the enigma of our presence is revealed without our knowledge.
The Great He-Goat (2019)
Ten museum guards, locked in the rooms at night, are engulfed by the Goya paintings they encounter all day. Their bearings gradually crumble, their connection with reality takes on absurd forms. Elucubrations, phantasmagorias, silent manipulations, outbursts, they spit out from the shadow a bastard humor, their only strength in the face of the announced debacle.
Haunted by the Black Paintings, the performance denounces the blind violence and intoxication of spirits that are timeless, like a curse of History.
A Taste of Poison (2018)
Hygienic buns and clinically shaved heads, five experts seriously and without laughing subject themselves to a series of experiments on today's behaviors. They adopt with pseudo-scientific logic a succession of behaviors that seem to relieve tensions: acting out, power games, addictions, perverse behaviors, glamorous abuses, liberated impulses, and sad passions.
Nine tests punctuate the performance. Gradually a more political but also more delirious point of view emerges from these private dissonances. Isn't everything connected, from the drifts of the intimate to the fate of societies?
VIDEOS
