Replicas is a dance work that pushes back against a world that often feels increasingly confined. It offers a visceral, immediate response, one that escapes the bounds of logic and structure. This is dance that resists neat categorisation: it is physical, raw, spontaneous, sensitive and inconsistent. It invites dialogue rather than delivering answers. It doesn’t aim for perfection, but instead opens space for dreaming, unpredictability and freedom of thought.

The performance leaves room for the audience’s imagination to wander, welcoming ambiguity and even imperfection as valid and vital experiences.

 

I often feel overwhelmed to see the increasingly toxic direction that our societies are taking. I never imagined that global fascism would return so quickly. And yet, here we are.

The dance spaces I am trying to create are a response to this: a transposition into a place that could give us room for expansion, or just to be. A place that could offer some relief from the prison elaborated through principles that want to govern, control, and shrink the perimeters of our lives: efficiency, productivity, order, linearity, usefulness, hierarchy, all designed with the purpose to exploit, control, oppress.

I am caught between worlds: I like efficiency, but hate pressure. I believe in society, yet social norms drain me. I want time to stretch endlessly, and there is nothing I like more than walking without a set itinerary.

The dance I like to see is an instant and entirely different reply to a narrowing world: it is wider than reason, more real, more physical, not-so-rational, refreshing, energetic, inconsistant, in dialogue, sensitive, and leads to no efficient outcome. It is not based on images, symbols or concepts: it likes to leave you free with your own thoughts and imagination. In one sense, it fights back to keep open a wider perimeter for human life, a perimeter that includes dreaming, being non-productive, incoherent, and even not-so-particularly "amazing".

The title Replicas plays between its English definition (the idea of copy, duplication, and therefore cyclicality), and the French word 'réplique' which means both 'an answer that marks stark opposition', and 'a new seismic tremor that comes in response to an earthquake'. Replica will be part of a diptych in which two juxtaposed pieces will respond to each other: Replicas, and Tremors.

 

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WHAT THE PROTAGONISTS SAY

"The dance I love is my way of answering a narrowing world. It’s not about symbols or concepts, but sensitivity, physicality, liveliness and connection. In its own way, it pushes back to keep open spaces for dreaming, for being unproductive, and not always making sense." - Alexandre Iseli

"We practice with the risk of fullness, we practice with the risk of emptiness, we practice the risk of falling in and out of attention and ourselves. We practice moving, being moved, moving through and with... We practice witnessing and being witnessed and the danger of being seen and heard. Replicas is shaped by a radical practice of listening" - Murielle Elizéon

"This work is about the endless possibilities we can have, choosing between body states, mind states, sounds, time, space. It is about the decision of making that choice instead of the other. It is about how we relate to each other, to our own self, to the space that surrounds us, to the people that are looking. About holding time, playing with it." - Eleni Roberts Kazouri

"A tragedy blending dance and music, conjuring up elements conducive to dialogue. It's an exploration of the limits of what is almost no longer dance and almost no longer music; with this mad goal in the background: to be oneself among others, without forcing it. This piece is a great breath of air, taking its inspiration from the shadow and exhaling long after it has been performed." - Thomas Belhom