Les Plateaux Sauvages x Christian & François Ben Aïm

At Les Plateaux Sauvages, Christian and François Ben Aïm unveil the third in a series of short solos composed for female dancers. Here, Alex Blondeau lends herself to the game.

A singular duo, the Ben Aïm brothers have been exploring the nuances of interpretation and the dancer’s relationship with time and space for twenty years. And in 2018, they began a series of female solos, Instantanés, imagined as a succession of haikus, that brief form of Japanese poetry that celebrates the ephemeral. In these site-specific pieces, the dancers are invited into an intimate exploration, to bring out a subterranean energy that unfolds as they dance.

Poetry of the moment

After Anne-Flore de Rochambeau, who inaugurated the series in 2015, and Léa Lansade, it’s now the turn of Alex Blondeau – a veteran of Maguy Marin’s May B and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company – to tackle this exercise. As in previous solos in the series, the dancer deploys nocturnal imaginations in which she conjures up a subtle dance of metamorphosis and disappearance. For a brief, almost elusive moment, we discover a performer, a personality.