en son lieu

En son lieu goes beyond the question of location alone. It flows over the portion circumscribed in space to return to the properties of matter, thus restoring full compositional power. First performed outdoors, on uneven ground along with background noise, breathing and the movement of nature, the solo by skilled break-dancer, Nicolas Fayol, sparks the quality of a gesture in immediate relation with the surrounding landscape. Contrary to the urban environment, contextualising hip-hop dance to the extreme, this type of immersion in a living environment reveals a form of poetic primacy, prior to any usefulness, external to any virtuosity. Back in the black box of the studio, the correspondence between inside and outside, experience and memory, clarifies the terms of a dialogue which, from the start, is played out in pairs. Fragments of narration arise from a bend in the body; a portrait takes shape, divides and splits within a process of abstraction, wherein perceptions and sensations are intensified. But what path should be taken: that of indulging in wanderlust in order to ward off loneliness, or of tearing away from oneself and drifting?

solo
Une maison (2019) brought amplified flow to the stage, diffracted through the bodies of fourteen dancers. I still feel the desire to unite flow in one body. I like that unique « one to one » relationship. Soli punctuate my choreographic career: a series of double, dissociated portraits, as fulfilling for myself as for those to whom I offer them.
My last solo dates back to 2012. Since then, I have created many group pieces. I feel the need to return to simpler forms, not so much in terms of results as in processes engaged: a conversation rather than polyphony.
I would call this the desire to re-focus. Exploring a detail, perhaps, which surfaced in une maison: extracting a body, drifting with the fragment and seeing where it takes us. Drifting together is always much fuller.

en son lieu
The title of this new creation follows in the footsteps of d’à côté, d’après nature and une maison: it continues to define a very vague space, named only by the practice it hosts.
A place on the scale of he/she who sets foot here: en son lieu. Placing the accent on the space of appearance and definition of the solo, and thus allowing the portrait to shift.
D’après nature was a first meander towards the “indoor - outdoor” vanishing line, a first incursion into the open field of translation. The principle of this ongoing project is to decontextualise dances which first appeared in the studio, by re-locating them into landscape and observing what remains after contact. Finally, the images are filmed and brought back to a black box. En son lieu. clings as closely as possible to the genesis of dances in their landscape. Making prints on the body, then bringing these prints back into the black box.

outdoor
To start with, it was essential for me to get out of the studio.
I want to be contaminated by a non-urban outdoor setting. I never talk of drifting but today, I need to move through and within my work, making this type of trip as if sidestepping. I wish to open a laboratory space. I feel it is necessary to do so.
Something surfaced in my last pieces. Something intuitive. I must now follow these persistent signs, seeing where the multiplied vanishing lines can take me.
Following intuition as if it would lead to the intrinsic properties of matter: its elasticity, the way in which it allows itself to be guided and in turn, guides movement.
What does it mean to track space? Today, it is essential for me to answer this call from without, or outdoor.
I am longing for natural landscapes. Mountains, with their rocky ridges. The sea, with its open, aligned horizon, torn between the mineral and aquatic element. Finally the forest, an almost closed, horizon-less environment, hidden by a profusion of plant life.
I want to stay as close as possible to the porosity between Nicolas’s movements, immersed in the landscape, and the movement of the landscape itself. Working not only with landscape matter, but also with landscape movement.
Dialoguing and finding the quality of a movement in its relation to the environment. And, through all of this, beyond utility, finding poetic primacy, a call to the imaginary.

indoor
We return to the studio with archived, integrated content-elements collected outdoors. More than feeling, seeing or hearing, this is about measuring their powers of abstraction, and accessing that perceptual intensity born only of the consciousness of returning to the studio. Immersing oneself in a more than natural environment, put to the test of tearing away from oneself. What is this fracture, this place of emptiness, set to be created by re-contextualisation in the black box?
Inventing, completing, filling from these uprooted impressions of the environment to produce a result which is something like overprinting.
Collecting, yes, but more importantly, making the collection visible, formal: this is where I consider that the challenges of composition lie.

nicolas fayol
I met Nicolas creating avant la nuit dernière in 2016 and d’à côté in 2017.
As a dancer, Nicolas works extensively on bodily fragmentation and equilibrium, stemming from his practice of hip-hop. It’s not so much the hip-hop that interests me here, as the way in which the dancer shifts, textures, and stretches dance, drawing it from the most unsuspected places in his body.
As a person, Nicolas, has chosen to live and work in the countryside, maintaining a direct relationship with living matter and the environment.
I am interested in his dual nature: how does he create his dance elsewhere than in the urban environment, so associated with hip-hop. He is the artist I was looking for, to go drifting together...

— Christian Rizzo, October 2019
comments collected by Smaranda Olcèse-Trifan