For its 28th edition, the Lausanne contemporary dance festival Les Printemps de Sévelin is joining forces for the first time with Arsenic as part of a joint program. From March 5 to 22, more than 20 shows, including six creations, will be available to discover in the two neighboring and supportive institutions. Common thread: impertinence.
This unmissable spring event presents notable Swiss contemporary dance projects, as well as shows of international stature. On display, immersive experiences, innovative formats, sensitive choreographies and committed works which explore possible emancipations and the links between body, action and environment, announce the organizers.
The selection is “deliberately bold, poetic and political”, they describe. During the three weeks of the event, the festival will also offer three workshops, a 1vs1 All Style Battle, meetings with artists, hybrid formats and three Party Nights.
“The artists we have programmed are poets of movement and impertinence. They offer us utopias that are antidotes to ‘brainrot’ (editor’s note: digital stupidity) and dancing encounters that go beyond political divisions,” underlines Kylie Walters, director of Sévelin 36, quoted in a press release.
Dialogue with a battery
Among the many highlights, Oukouy (Spain/Ivory Coast) will open the festival with his show “Black” which rethinks the black body in the Western world. Latvian Jana Jacuka offers “HA”, a solo that explores the performativity of laughter as an escape mechanism. The voice becomes an extension of the body and shifts into a communication that goes beyond words.
In the show “Reverberations, study 8”, the Franco-Spanish choreographer Aina Alegre enters into dialogue with a drum set. Alone on stage, exploring the gesture of “beating”, between dance and percussion, she activates a new fiction around hammering.
Between concert and parade, “Cavalcade” by David Zagari (Switzerland) is inspired by the spaghetti western. This creation, premiered at Sévelin 36, uses risk as a material to shake up power relations, on a physical and sonic terrain that is composed in real time.
This edition was designed with staggered schedules to allow the public and professionals to navigate between Sévelin 36 and Arsenic and thus increase the number of discoveries.
www.theatresevelin36.ch
