Repertoire

The story is that of a utopia : an ideal socio-cultural world where peace, calm, happiness and equality reign for all.

In hip-hop culture, codes — verbal, sartorial, musical — are meant to make everyone the equal of all. Utopie looks at what that promise cost those whose sexual orientation had no place in it, and names the illusion.

The themes the piece addresses are among those subjects that obsess to the point where writing about them can only be the result of a keen emotion. Urgency remains in command of the situation from the very start of the choreographic writing process: certain subjects impose themselves even when the decision to write is still struggling to be made, and so the pen outruns its author.

The creation process

The diversity of the means of expression calls for a process allowing a harmonious dialogue between the performing arts disciplines. Improvisation is one of the main tools of creation:

— improvisation around the text, so that the performers make the material their own using their own words;
— danced improvisations alongside the work on the theme, the narration resting on a mixture of textual and danced scores;
— physical scores proposed by the dancers from the main themes of the story, which evolve over the rehearsals up to the final construction.

The story is that of a woman who decides to shut herself away in a psychiatric hospital after losing her love. Following that admission, the heroine goes through an inner journey, between the imposing presence of the memories of her passionate history, her childhood, and her many attempts to live again without what had long been her reason for living and the dressing on all her wounds.

The heroine’s return to the neighbourhood of her childhood takes the spectator into another space, where the daily life of a country at war is told to her. In this way the heroine’s love story meets the story of a whole country.

The piece questions the link between the exile of love and exile from the land, between the body of the beloved and one’s roots. If love remains a haven of peace, the cradle of the wildest illusions, the land is the original cradle of all dreams, the source of every new life. But the land of childhood is now a space of war, a land that bleeds and no longer shelters the buds of the life of former times. The heroine’s personal exile and her exile in love thus find their echo in collective exile, that of an entire people.

The choreographic themes are inspired by the one Didier Mayemba considers our mother, the Earth, and by what is able to give life and death. In it he singles out Man, the Animal, the Sky, the Sea. He likes to observe and to translate human behaviour, news both momentous and trivial, the movements of our planet — what leads and shapes the world of tomorrow.

The grounding of the body in the floor, raised up by the break, and the techniques of bodily vibration tested to the extreme by pop and electro allow him to serve an elegant, natural movement, close to that of the themes that inspire him. The originality and the variety of his choreographic combinations come from his equal use of the space and the energy of contemporary dance and Afro-Cuban dance.

It is a theme very dear to the eye of the choreographer, who at every moment finds himself in a ceaseless back-and-forth between fluidity and rupture, between benevolence and brutality, between calm and the madness of the body. Feeling gentleness makes us fear harshness; living harshness makes us long for gentleness. The better to reveal them, Didier Mayemba stages them: gentleness and harshness turn into strength and fragility, suffering and joy, turmoil and quietude.

These oppositions, at times fragile, at times unsettled, are used as a developer and give form to their inseparable duality. “Entre deux mondes” brings out the precise instant through these two energies, as a black-and-white photograph reveals it through the contrast of the two colours. It lets us see movement and life emerge from opposition, and makes us want these divergences: it offers them to us as kindly, because creative.

We often associate the round with good nature, affability or benevolence, while we lend rigour, authority or rigidity to the square. For the choreographer, the circle expresses movement and fluidity, and the square grounding and stability.

In order to serve his observations on these two concepts and his thinking on the space created by their contrast, Didier Mayemba chooses the language of break and brakka. The break, a free and spontaneous hip-hop dance technique, is largely inspired by the circle and devoted to the floor: it naturally lends its movement to round countries. Whirling dancers transgress the sovereign rules of balance. They turn, and turn, and turn again. The whimsical round of men does not turn so round.

Born of the people, a marriage of joy and revolt, each of these dances voices the urgency of asserting its existence. A paradox between its appearance and its workings, between the visible and the invisible, the Earth, through its rigorous evolution, is “the square”. A dreamlike vision, a danced dream, this work is an escape in which the visual effects that won hip-hop dance its standing are given pride of place.

“Pays ronds dans un monde carré” leaves us free to interpret the small infernal round engaged between round and square.

True to his artistic line, Didier Mayemba explores origins, the movement of the universe, sap. He dances the simple, divine and violent communion that exists between a man and a woman, believing themselves alone in the world.

“Sève” is also the phonetics of “saved” in English: save. At the dawn of the 21st century, a modest call to face up to things, to save the planet’s sap, through the human being’s natural predisposition to live.

A hip-hop dance show whose purpose is to blend the magic of Christmas with the joy that lives in the neighbourhoods at that time of year.

It depicts the choreographer’s childhood memories, along with all the magic that the month of December brings to local people. That month has the gift of setting everyday worries aside: residents, young and old, gather in the community centres or the social centres, all driven by a single aim — to bring happiness to those close to them. Every parent, every person finds their childlike soul again on Christmas Eve.