Pour Dolores

At the origin of Pour Dolores, the apparition of a woman’s face, a silent enigmatic presence, insistent, emanating entirely from an ancient mask of painted cardboard. Matt complexion, rough cut features, black hair straightened in kiss-curl at the temple, red lips and sideways gaze. This chance encounter at a flea market and the find itself aroused in Josef Nadj something like an appeal, an injunction: to learn who “Dolorès” was, to give her body, to discover the woman behind this female mask.

Materialising a project that had haunted him for many years, in his quest the choreographer chose to make reference to the Fluxus movement. Born in the 1960s, this collective of artists (above all musicians, but also visual artists and writers) was, along with others who were perhaps less radical, at the origin of performance art. Fluxus extolled continuity between art and life, and saw artistic creation as a vast field of experiences where every artistic discipline could contribute. Among their experimentations, Nadj focused particularly on those valuing brevity and simplicity and ordinariness; those re-examining the environment and objects, with all their characteristics, material and structural; but also the interactions of man with what
surrounds him – modifying perception, questioning received wisdom, disrupting custom and bringing forth from the chaos new harmonies. In the spirit of Fluxus, every human action and every object can generate sound. Every object, no matter what it is, can be “played”. And each sound can be heard as music.

Wrought once again from the image of the double, Josef Nadj’s latest piece in duet with Ivan Fatjo is particularly in the continuation of his most recent works, Ozoon (2013) and Paysage inconnu (2014). For while music has always constituted an essential element of composition in the stage work of Nadj, the search for convergence, for the closest possible union or even a veritable fusion between music and dance, were key preoccupations of these pieces created in collaboration with the saxophonist Akosh Szelevényi and the drummer Gildas Etevenard.

In a sense, with Pour Dolores, Josef Nadj and Ivan Fatjo have moved “to the other side”. The musicians have deserted the stage, while the “music”, omnipresent in the piece, is now created by the actions of the dancers. And while we notice the presence on stage of a grand piano, a hunting horn and a cello with two bows, there are also – to give birth to this music – surgical instruments, a massive imposing metal plate, a long thin rod, a rubber ball, hemp fibres, a brass helmet, a small spherical bell, a bust of Socrates reflected in an oval mirror, and the teeth of a stuffed wolf… The entire space vibrates and resonates. Yet the keys do not move the hammers which do not strike the strings of the piano, the cello strings are neither plucked nor bowed, and no breath sets the horn to quivering.

Paradoxically in this work for the stage, the visual and sound dimensions have taken precedence over the theatrical and choreographic. Placed under the banner of patience and attentiveness, of obstinacy in its artistic exploration, Pour Dolores takes the form of a recital, its programme a cycle of gestural, visual and musical miniatures – 24 in number, like the hours of the day. A recital dedicated to an anonymous woman, a certain Dolores.

Myriam Bloedé

History :

6 février 2016

Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite

Almada (PT)

4 décembre 2015

Théâtre de la tête noire

Saran (FR)

9 octobre 2015

Emmetrop

Bourges (FR)

30 mai 2015

Festival La Voix est libre

Paris (FR)

27-29 mai 2015

Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans

Orléans (FR)