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Press
Chambre blanche by the Brussels choreographer Michèle Noiret is clearly one of the strong moments of the Danse Emoi biennial in Limoges : a long moment of choreographic and aesthetic happiness. Four magnificent dancers, Julie Devigne, Dominique Godderis, Shantala Pepe and Lise Vachon, in full command of their body and their art, offer the captivated audience a series of situations and images between play, seduction, domination, avoidance and everyday gestures.. (...) All women, all femininity, are in this show, which takes us back to our own desires, questions, artistic and poetic references – giving it its undoubted richness. And we can affirm without grandiloquence that we are not far from a masterpiece!».
In Chambre blanche by Michèle Noiret and four dancers, a mellow air is raised through abrupt changes of the directions of arms, upper bodies and the whole bodies, as well as through layers of the pattern in which unisons are thrown into confusion before they are completely formed. After the dancers’ moving naked backs facing the audience evoke a sense of tension, movements along with vibrant jazz set the groove on stage.»
What grabbed my attention most in Dance Triennale Tokyo 2009 is Chambre blanche by Michèle Noiret. In a simple space surrounded by white curtains on three sides, an isolated table is placed. Suddenly, a woman stands up and stares quietly around at the audience. Then, a secret story begins, through the least expected development of sequences with a feeling of tension as if you are peeping at the sins committed by the beautiful women. The outstanding technique of the dancers is also thrilling, and fully draws the audience toward the stage. What is left behind is the excitement and reverberation as if when you have seen a high quality suspense film. I could not but feel the underlying strength of Belgium, major nation in contemporary dance, through the accuracy and the irresistible attractiveness of the performance.»
Michèle Noiret excels in the art of dominating the space and controlling the execution; the various abstract elements making up the game combine harmoniously and wow – all we can do is instantly yield. The climax occurs against an electronic baroque piece of music. The finale, the Jitterbug, adds to the volume and all the characters resume their functions.»
The dancer choreographer delivers a creation that is well on the way to being a minor masterpiece. She whose career is essentially one of remarkable solos, makes here, with three other dancers, a finely polished gem in which abstraction incorporates a subtle ‘dialogue’ between the four performers, and that comprises nothing… abstract in an expression laden with discreet emotion. One is ‘seized’ from the first minute to the last by this ‘conversation’, which produces an on-stage atmosphere that has elements of a waking dream. And all this in a body language of rare intelligence in which the least gesture finds its precise weight and place. It is magnificent (...). Michèle Noiret demonstrates with admirable simplicity that dance in its purest form has lost nothing of its raison d'être. Let her be thanked for that.»
The unexpected follows the improbable, in the style of this choreography creating a labyrinth in an entirely empty space. Chambre blanche is made up of many obstacles that the inspired dancers strive to circumvent, interior obstacles that form the world of their psyche...When the gesture describes the contours of the soul, one will remember the movement of a quest for identity, one will also remember the contre-pied of the final scene, rhythmic and festive, cocking a snoop at the apparatchiks of contemporary dance!»
Michèle Noiret’s Chambre blanche was one of the best shows I have ever seen at FTA. A completely committed show, with high-quality performers and a fine and subtle dramaturgy in a stripped yet totally effective scenography. The work of a goldsmith. (...) One bathes here in a gentle and pernicious madness, which may lie dormant in each of us...»
In Chambre blanche, the musical composition of Todor Todoroff and Stevie Wishart intensifies the interior journey that watermarks the works of Michèle Noiret, where what prevails is discovery of self, of the foreign and of the strange in oneself, of what happens in the body’s adventure towards the unknown. She shows the intimate, gives it the place it deserves, without forcing anything. (…) The public will be able to see the result in movement of polished, fine choreographic writing, like lace in the breeze, an undeniable sensuality.»
Everything is done so that in the opening minutes a unique ambiance is created, a strong signature. The Noiret universe one discovers in Montréal is clearly identified. (...) Michèle Noiret reveals herself as a mistress of turmoil, between the erotic and the phantasmagorical, subjecting the audience to a rapture, a tumbling into a parallel universe, a bewitchment from which there is no escape.»
The most interesting choreographer in French-speaking Belgium, in the opinion of Le Nouvel observateur, Michèle Noiret is coming to Montréal for the first time. Michèle Noiret’s universe is of a restrained intensity. The apparent common sense of the clothes, of classical stone-coloured silk dresses, is constantly contradicted by the erotic tension that drives the lively and precise movements. The coats and heels the dancers shed then pull back on, even the hairstyles, create a highly Hitchcockian fetishist aesthetic. Turbulent, the relations between the dancers oscillate between tenderness and coldness, between gentleness and dry violence.»
And all this works not because Noiret and her dancers do a lot, but because they do just enough. Critics often use the word «breathtaking» to positively describe a show, yet we’d have to create an opposite but just as equally positive word to describe Chambre blanche: «breathgiving». It is near perfect (…) Chambre blanche is without a doubt the best dance show of this first half of Festival TransAmérique. Dear Michèle Noiret, don’t make me beg you to come back to visit us. Even though I would.»
The work of Michèle Noiret is a marvel of refinement. The creator excels in the balance between confidence and gestural clarity. For everyone who contemporary dance leaves perplexed, this is a show to be seen.»
We don’t know what the Chambre blanche is or signifies, because there is no narration, no calligraphy, no clear syntax in the meetings in duo, in trio or in quartet of these four women whose lives and imaginations cross around a table, like in a kitchen. (...) I stress, we don’t know, and that is perhaps why we feel carried by a surrealistic and unconscious force, that we fall upon our knees before the plasticity of an impeccable limpidity, the overdose of minimalist dance and the provocative body language that remains entwined with a game of looks awaiting something that never comes, the elegance of these fibrous bodies that at the end will shatter into the abstraction of a strip of torsos uncovered in the half-light, while they work their network of muscles and bones like absolutely hypnotic, shapeless, fibrous statues, then distil a pure dance art of their immobile condition of human statues in a wonderful and highly poetic exercise of entirely sculptural choreography. (...) Through its call to the audience to fill this uncomfortable emptiness of illusions and fears with the imaginary, Chambre blanche (...) is doubly affecting due to the scraping, irritated texture of the crushing sound scrape of Todor Todoroff and Stevie Wishart, a sound track – here, completely – in the style of Lynch, which does not shape the atmosphere of the choreography but rather creates and untangles it, justifies and gives it impetus; it is the sound track of a stupefied and disordered world in which four women wander, cross each other’s path, stumble and slip away with no other weapon than the extraordinary power of their femininity. Chambre blanche is an apologia of the body and the language of women who are already masters of their own space.»
Chambre blanche presents itself like a small case containing nothing but a long hour full of dance, with all the good things this can offer when, besides four superb dancers, it is the occasion to express a thousand things, with the talent needed to order them in time and space. (…) Impeccable work. The four bodies express a huge number of nuances enveloped in a magnificent visual and sound space. (…) The dancers (…) all belong to the same universe – some mention Virginia Woolf or Lynch, but everyone can lose themselves in their imagination – and everyone holds a complete world, wrapped entirely in an atmosphere in which the lights and the wonderful musical work of Todoroff, a great expert in the choreographer’s work, play a fundamental role. In the end, alongside more dreamlike images, as when Noiret very gently pushes the table across the space, the literal bodies of the women suddenly appear: the half nakedness of their bodies, bags of vertebrae, shoulder blades that move, sometimes in an unconnected way … But even this material, under the effect of the light, of talent… becomes poetry. That’s when one starts to understand what this artist who started out, like so many others, at Bejart’s Mudra school in Brussels, calls ‘choreographic characters.»
The white space in the piece, which initially emanates purity and neutrality, is gradually invaded by the anxiety of the search and the surprise of the encounter. On this imaginary road the dancers start an interesting game of coming together and moving apart in which gestures and looks are loaded with symbolism. Music and dance join forces to begin an exercise of discontinuous continuity. The dancers go from reunion to separation, defying the rhythm, linking the subtlest of gestures, uniting the most rapid of figures. Thanks to the superb lighting and the soundscape, which stresses the anguish of the search, the room is filled with a suggestive and disconcerting atmosphere. The dancers, including Michèle Noiret herself, demonstrate their absolute command of technique, stamping total clarity and perfect coordination on their movements, in the duos as well as the trios and the quartets, in which they are able to express the dance with the minimum of gestures.»
Chambre blanche is a permanent exercise of integrating dance in movement without it giving the impression of existing. The stage is surrounded by white curtains, for which Michèle Noiret drew inspiration from the films of David Lynch. The four dancers suddenly appear from these curtains – solo, duo, trio or quartet – and slowly unfurl a purified choreography, with impossible movements that appear simple and seem, but it is only appearance, to be achieved effortlessly by these four immense performers, who include Michèle Noiret. Although it is a choral work, the presence of Michèle Noiret is significant and intense. Her dance lights up the stage, especially in the movement where, at the side of the white table, she walks in slow motion, pushing it across the whole stage. Her impossible levés and her dance sur pointes, barefoot, combine in an interpretive force of gesture that is never left to chance. The four performers change aesthetic: from bun to dishevelled hair; from clothed to naked, to show how the muscles of the back move, lit, in reference to Man Ray, only by a white beam, which creates strange images on the human body. When excellence is achieved, the evidence is such that doubt is no longer permitted. With Chambre blanche, the choreographer manages to offer an hour and a half of dance without ornament, accompanied only by the light, an unusual sound track… and a touch of humour.»
The room at the close of day, at nightfall, with these feminine shadows that grow longer, is also a time of poetry. The folds of these white net curtains that cover the walls seem to create these characters and swallow them. It all exudes a strange, almost surreal gentleness. A very successful, accomplished piece.»
Ideal fairness, appropriate black dress, the Belgian choreographer has this huge talent for creating an anxiety-provoking threat through gestures at first anodyne. In Chambre blanche, a feminine quartet, it’s enough that they slowly push a table for a scenario of intimate collapse to creep in. Self-doubt, doubt about the sense of her action, incredulity too before her own body rises to the surface in this piece.»
With above average sensitivity and a magical elegance, the Belgian choreographer Michèle Noiret invites us to penetrate ever deeper into the mysteries of the subconscious. In Chambre blanche, she conjures up multilayered images as so many thresholds that need to be crossed to understand reality. Clouded identities, the search for the other, for oneself, fugitive visions overlap to beat the underlying tempo of drives.»
Whithout doubt, the most sensationnal moment of dance of the year 2006! A female quartet, fascinating and mysterious, even slightly schizophrene, for a strange and unsettling voyage, pervarded by a magnetic white light...»
Noiret manages to create a mysterious, dreamlike universe close to that of David Lynch; by mixing humour and sensuality, her so precise dance disturbs and charms the audience.»
Chambre blanche reaffirms yet again the brilliant character of Michèle Noiret’s gestural language : the incisiveness of the extremities allows for the undulation of the rest of the body in the troubling suspension of subtle spasms, of retained flight, of hurried slides, from where a veiled, dreamlike intoxication is emitted. In this feminine quartet, these qualities are appreciated even more because Michele Noiret has exceptionally renounced the use of very sophisticated image technology, that in her previous pieces, multiplies the deep echoes of the inner worlds which haunt her.»
In the world of Belgian dance, the work of Michèle Noiret, characterised by a gestural clarity combined with poetic truth, is an exception. (...) Chambre Blanche is inspired by the universe of Virginia Woolf, with whom she shares the same quest for intimacy; a grand deprivation that unfolds in a closed space though extensible to the dimensions of a dream, an empty room with, in the corner, a table as the sole element of reality. There, four women will prove themselves, question themselves, affirm themselves. Each one posses a strong and singular personality, but all are accustomed to to the same elegance of gesture. Their dance seems to pour from the Limbo of the unconscious. Michèle Noiret the choreographer captures and engraves this intimacy just as quickly as Michèle Noiret the dancer delivers with the same generosity. Without losing any of the clarity of gesture, she colors it with a new sensuality as if the tone of confidence of Chambre Blanche had awoken partly from itself, that which up until now was kept secret and allows itself to communicate at last.»
Four dancers trying to find themselves: inner movements, buried identities. The space is bare, occupied by a lone table. Michèle Noiret projects her “choreographical characters” into this “Chambre blanche” haunted by the Virginia Woolf of “The Waves” and “A room of One’s Own”, but also by “the room”, that mysterious place you find in a David Lynch movie. An empty yet open room, where anything can happen, especially the unexpected.»
You absolutely must see this link in the long series where Michèle Noiret questions the dark and unspeakable part of our soul with choreographic means of a rare elegance. The mathematical precision of the movements and the occupation of the space do not prevent emotion from peeking though on several occasions. From a single support, a table white as the white page of a writer, four dancers exercise their sensuality, each of them defining her own personality, first alone, then in relation to the group where the search for identity leads the dance. The prevailing dreamlike universe is similar to that of David Lynch, set to music by Todor Todoroff and Stevie Wishart and lighting by Xavier Lauwers, Michèle Noiret’s two other transcendental supports, in addition to the famous white table. Standing, laying, sitting, alone or grouped, these three young dancers, Sarah Piccinelli, Lise Vachon and Dominique Godderies, have graceful moments and miraculous harmony between them, around the game’s mistress, Michèle Noiret.»
Rather than fixing her art to the acquirements of the past, Michèle Noiret uses them to reach an extreme purity and a new liberty. No reference here to the technology so present in her previous performances, however, followers of Noiret’s entire career will again find gestures, queries, humour and sensuality present in her universe since the beginning.»
Four dancers trying to find themselves: inner movements, buried identities. The space is bare, occupied by a lone table. Michèle Noiret projects her “choreographical characters” into this “Chambre blanche” haunted by the Virginia Woolf of “The Waves” and “A room of One’s Own”, but also by “the room”, that mysterious place you find in a David Lynch movie. An empty yet open room, where anything can happen, especially the unexpected.»
A poetic reflexion in the guise of an identity quest producing a stage play around the quadrupling of the same personality. A resolutely mysterious and fascinating atmosphere. An unclear piece despite the vibrant white purity of its lights, which make the skin ever more transparent…»
Cast & credits
Conception and choreography Michèle Noiret
Created and interpreted by Dominique Godderis, Michèle Noiret, Sarah Piccinelli, Lise Vachon
On tour Dominique Godderis, Shantala Pepe, Sarah Piccinelli, Lise Vachon
Choreographical assistant Pascale Gigon
Musical composition Stevie Wishart, Todor Todoroff
Additionnal sounds Aline Huber
Lighting design Xavier Lauwers
Scenography Wim Vermeylen
Costumes Patricia Eggerickx
Hair and make up Michelle Lemaire
Technical direction Christian Halkin
Light technician Marc Lhommel
Sound technician Aurélien Chouzenoux
Photography Sergine Laloux
Artistic collaboration Pascal Chabot
Production and tour manager Amandine Rimbert
Communication and press Alexandra de Laminne
Administration and coordination Cathy Zanté
Duration 65 min
A production of La Cie Michèle Noiret/Tandem asbl
In coproduction with Le Théâtre Les Tanneurs
With the support of Ministère de la Communauté française de Belgique-Service de la Danse.
The Compagnie Michèle Noiret is subsidized by Le Ministère de la Communauté française Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service de la Danse and receives the regular help of Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI).