Retour en Avant / Past Forward Biennale de la Danse Lyon - France

Frank MichelettiBorn in 1966 in Nice, Frank Micheletti receivedtheatre training with Jean-Pierre Raffaelli andworked with Hubert Colas and Isabelle Pousseur.He then decided to focus on dance, and attendedcourses led by Catherine Diverrés, BernadoMontet and by Josef Nadj. He performed in Auxrois couverts de cendres, choreographed byWilliam Petit, and since 1994 has danced in theworks created by Compagnie Josef Nadj as dancer(Le Canard pékinois, Les Echelles d’Orphée,L’Anatomie d’un fauve, Woyzek, CommediaTiempo, Les Commentaires d’Habacuc); inaddition, he assisted Nadj with the staging of LeCri du caméléon, co-produced with the CentreNational des Arts du Cirque. In 1996 he foundedthe Kubilaï Khan Investigations collective withCynthia Phung-Ngoc, Ivan Mathis and LaurentLetourneur, and co-created each of its works:Wagon Zek, dépôt (1996), Wagon zek, dépôt2 (1997), S.O.Y. (1999), Tanin no Kao (2001),Mecanica popular (2002), Sorrow Love Song(2004), Akasaka Research (2004), Gyrationsof Barbarous Tribes (2005, creating during aresidency in Mozambique), Akasaka Research #2(2006) and Koko Doko (2006, Franco-Germanproject). He took part in CRASH LANDING, aseries of improvisations initiated by Meg Stuartat the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and also participatedin Felix Ruckert’s interactive show Ring. Hehas also joined an artists’ collective in Santiago,Chile; co-directed an performance installationon the memory of the body; and taken partin a project called La Frontera to meet LatinAmerican artists.Kubilaï Khan InvestigationsKubilaï Khan Investigations is a cross-disciplinaryspace where various languages are blended inan attempt to establish polytonal writing. All thematerials used are like singular points that formcreative hotbeds. Our work is to promote anarrangement and architectonic composition ofthese elements, which allow a kind of circulationand new usage; to link them without weakeningwhat makes them distinctive.The company’s artists gather their materials –simple, strange, technical and poetic gestures– in their personal experiences, from thepolitico-social determinants of our societies; inthe availability opened up to them by certaintexts and works by artists, philosophers, authors,architects and poets; in the face-voices of womenand men whom they encounter here andelsewhere; and in the margins where the risk ofnot belonging resonates.CreationAn empty space for bodies, their marks andmeetings, their looks and unwrappings. Bodies’comings and goings, the places where theymake contact. Comings and goings, rhythmsof open and closed bodies, multiplying linesand curves and solids and syncopes,where their persistent and vanishingtrajectories are drawn. Depart fromour bodies as they interact –leaning, balancing, interposing,destabilising, changing, combining.A piece about activatedrelationships.Co-existence, co-spatialityand co-presence in what isshifting, in the gaps.Ongoing re-definition offorms as matter, as medium,as necessity.Choreographic score as asharing of flux, of intensities,of suspensions, tunedto the singular and telling ofour common conditions.A musical work played live,coming from all sides, like anecessary volume and overflow.The only thing that happens iswhat comes, a stage to cross; in atactile approach to the other.How can the past shape the future?The past is a possible future, incomplete and open.Perhaps all times are “to come”, and perhaps timecategories are not so separable and sequenceable,and form realities and perceptions that develop, clashwith and infiltrate each other in a “single phrase”: ourbodies are filters that turn over. Reversible, reversed:time elapses in them and clouds their materiality. Thereare unaccomplished possibilities in the past, whichrise up from our reserves and find openings, breaches,availabilities; and shape our present. There are intricaciesof time, blends, returns, imprints, returns, visions,projections, hybrids, branches, incrustations, cuts.Around us is a constellation of plural times that fold,unfold, multiply.Our receptive and vulnerable presences are played outin the countless sensitive forms of the effects of time.Frank MichelettiExtra info:World PremièreCo-produced by the Biennalewww.kubilai-khan-investigations.com59