Statut
Présentation
Press
Hors-champ takes us into a fictional world where objectives are deliberately confounded, where the private space is mixed with the public space and where the audience members, always active, even reactive, are not at leisure to position themselves as if at their post in front of the television (...) Here the film is constructed before our hallucinating eyes, but Michèle Noiret insures we maintain a certain liberty over what we see, what we hear. This Hors-champ allows us to capture micro-realities which intensely nourish the fiction. A remarkable choreographic work.»
A mysterious and disturbing atmosphere, brutal images that strike directly at the heart of a drama, the nature of which, reality or a nightmare, we are never to know: Hors-champ, a performance that dances, is theatrical and cinematic, is of a most fascinating efficiency. Images superbly captured by Patric Jean's camera constantly appear in Michèle Noiret's biting mise en scène wherein the choreography marvelously melts into the drama and the characters pass from the screen to the stage with a rare virtuosity. Between victim and oppressor, at the heart of a malevolent ambiance which brings to mind the tenor of totalitarian regimes (...), Hors-champ impoisoned wanderings ensue. (...) A rare thing on stage, how the performance is as captivating as a film can be. And its five performers serve it marvelously.»
Michèle Noiret (…) continues her quest for hybridity between choreographic and cinematic composition. (…) It’s worth looking closer at the title: Hors-champ. Concretely, the sets are mobile and intentionally labyrinthine (…) While the camera circulates on its own through hidden corners, undetectable from the audience’s viewpoint. At these moments spaces open up and slide into a lone image, wherein the movement suddenly takes the lead in stimulating the imagination. The work is sophisticated and impressive for the quality of its realisation. It’s based, on one hand, on the referential aesthetic of a thriller and on the other an intricate and vertiginous dance, both masterful and canonising. Michèle Noiret knows how to orchestrate the interlacing of the two art forms, without it becoming simple discord or displacement. No need to question the aesthetic references themselves that the piece conjugates, something in the piece Hors-champ fixes itself in the familiar taste of excellence in craftsmanship.»
A perfect style exercise
With a stage design in the form of a cinema set in perpetual motion, a big screen and a camera moving around the stage, Michèle Noiret virtually achieves perfection. The protagonists: various rooms in a house and five magnificent dancers who move from the real to the virtual, creating a new, more disquieting and artificial reality. The danced parts (...) are truly extraordinary, with the use of the floor (and the bed) punctuated with contacts that strengthen the suggestive force still more.»
Hors-Champ, a mix of dance, theatre and cinema, is the biggest hit on 2015 Beijing International Women Festival. Michèle Noiret, the choregrapher, director and playwright, is a famous Belgian dance artist. (...) Noiret’s Hors-Champ is an incredible work to smoothly combine the performance, stage-setting, pre-shooting video and real-time shooting videos into one integrated piece, blurring the boundaries of film and stage. (...) “In my work, camera is a very important tool. I arranged a cameraman for the show at the beginning of my creation because the facial expression of the dancers and certain angles of the stage can only be captured by camera.»
Hors-champ is is an aesthetic gem with a technique that lights up the stage. The moving set and the live footage create a giddiness accentuated by the dancing scenes, which, happily, leave room for emotion. The complex stage design, a fusion of genres, multiplies the perspectives, which capture the intimacy of the characters like a sensory kaleidoscope.»
Poised between Christophe Gans’s Silent Hill, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and any film of Hitchcock, Hors-Champ is a hybrid UFO of perfect aesthetics, between dance, acting and video, which questions the sense and the limits of reality.»
Choreographer Michèle Noiret, has for some years already been exploring the concept of “dance-cinema”, a concept that she created in which live performance and cinema, choreographic language and the language of the seventh art are all interwoven. With this research she experiments with new forms of composition, a new type of performance. The installation allows for a vertiginous multiplication of spaces, in which the concept of hallucination is handled with an undeniable mastery. (…) The performance plunges into a gigantic play with time – the times – creating a space-time that is endlessly renewed by this “dance-cinema” in which the sets change before our very eyes. The wandering spirit may dream at times, yet the spectator is inevitably active, constantly solicited. Though Michèle Noiret introduces a mysterious and violent story (…) There is a blurring of where it is all leading, deformations both visual and in the sound, a porousness at the frontier between fiction and reality… Out of this ensemble is born a pronounced disquiet, a vibrant digression which has its roots in the mental plane.»
We let ourselves get carried away by the conjunction, the intertwining, even the contradiction that exists between cinema and dance; events on the screen and movements on stage, filmed places then reproduced in part in the form of modules that can be moved about the stage. (…) An endless mysterious confusion in which recorded and live images, the projected and repeated are woven together. Also between dream and reality, perhaps even a memory, a shame for past horrors… Because Hors-champ embodies its share of obscurity, using in particular the cinematic gimmicks of the storm and the labyrinth. In order, later on, to touch upon the slapstick in a momentum that is almost comic. As a whole it assumes its artifice, its hybridisation, while affirming all possible aspects of the Droste effect. And does so by pursuing illusion and playing with the idea of hallucination.»
Five dancers and a cameraman in a vertiginous dive between stage and screen. A strange performance, often troubling and disconcerting. A distressing world which the five dancers bring magnificently to life.»
Cast & credits
Script, staging and choreography Michèle Noiret
Created with and danced by Juan Benitez, Filipe Lourenço, Isael Mata, Marielle Morales, Lise Vachon
Artistic collaboration Dominique Duszynski
Assistant Florence Augendre
Films Patric Jean
Stage cameraman Vincent Pinckaers
Original music composition Todor Todoroff
Cellist Sigrid Vandenbogaerde
Music Bernard Hermann, Danger Mouse
Set design Sabine Theunissen
Assistant Caroline Goradesky
Light design Xavier Lauwers
Costumes Greta Goiris
Technical direction Christian Halkin
Technical direction Théâtre National Romain Gueudré
Light Marc Lhommel, Ludovic Desclin (alternating)
Video Benoît Gillet
Sound Vanessa Court
Technical direction on stage Christian Halkin, Christophe Blacha, Julien Desmet, Corentin Longe
Dresser Nalan Kosar
Set making Ateliers du Théâtre National, Bruxelles / Dominique Pierre, Yves Philippaerts, Pierre Jardon
Painting Anaïs Thomas, Catherine Deprez, Nathalie Salamero, Félicia Parent
Costume tailoring and creation Ateliers du Théâtre National, Bruxelles / Nicole Moris, Nalan Kosar, Lise Crétiaux, Nathalie Willems
Films editing Théo Dieupart
Films sound effects Damien Defailly Studio 5/5
Mixing of sound effects Romain Gueudré
Technical director (exterior film shooting) Mathias Donnay
Photography Sergine Laloux
Production and tour manager Claire Geyer
Production and tour manager Sarah De Ganck / Art Happens
Communication and press Alexandra de Laminne
Administration and coordination Cathy Zanté
Production director Blackmoon Productions Yohanna Dufourg
Duration 85 minutes
Executive production : Compagnie Michèle Noiret/Tandem asbl
Production : Compagnie Michèle Noiret / Tandem asbl and Blackmoon Productions
Coproductions : Théâtre National de la Communauté française de Belgique, Brussels • Théâtre National de Chaillot, Paris • Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg • Le Théâtre de Liège • Le Manège.Mons/Technocité in the project TRANSDIGITAL supported by FEDER, program Interreg IV France-Wallonie-Vlaanderen, with the participation of UMons/Numédiart.
With the support of the Pictanova Fond Expériences Interactives (Fund for Interactive Experimentation), Wallimage and Dicream/CNC.
Produced with the support of the Ministère de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service de la Danse.
The Compagnie Michèle Noiret is subsidised by the Ministère de la Communauté française Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service de la Danse, and receives regular support from Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI).
Michèle Noiret is member of the Académie royale de Belgique.