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Slow Show is an intensive and agitated dance whose visible repercussions are minimal, precise, concentrated. The performance is rooted in the principles of trance, exultation, telepathy, and unconscious memories, revealing their strength and vivacity through movements slowed to the extreme, almost imperceptible, almost invisible. The invisible is not emptiness, nor is it calmness or absence. It is here as the sign of what happens, densely, inside the bodies.

Designed by choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, the Slow Show premiered in Los Angeles in February 2019 as part of the Shelter or Playground performance program organized by the MAK Center of Art and Architecture at Schindler House (Los Angeles, USA). On a music specially created by Eddie Ruscha, twenty-two performers, professional dancers and dance students from CalArts, inhabited the space and time of this iconic house created in 1922 by the architect Rudolph M. Schindler and built with Clyde Chase in the West Hollywood district in Los Angeles. Bodies and sounds echo through the very foundations of the site: they evoke cohabitation, distances, forms; and they traverse individual and common spaces.

For its second edition, the Slow Show brings together fifty amateur dancers chosen by Luma Arles, at Parc des Ateliers. After three days of work and preparation with Dimitri Chamblas, the group presented the performance in the « desert », a dry and luminous site at the foot of the Luma tower, offering changing perspectives to the public: complete or fragmented points of view, close-up or at distance; mirages moving in the dust and in the sounds produced for the occasion by Eddie Ruscha, echoing the site and its history.

The Slow Show then took place at Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation d'entreprises Galeries Lafayette, in Paris, in cooperation with the MC93 of Bobigny, with 50 participants from the Paris area, and then at CDC La Termitère, Ouagadougou, in the framework of the Dialogues de Corps festival, with students dancers from the CDC school, amateurs from Ouagadougou, and young people from Mali refugees in Burkina Faso.

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Slow Show is both a workshop, and a way for the inhabitants of a territory to meet through a physical practice, to experience different states and intensities, to build an ephemeral community and to offer to a large audience a collective performance.

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Conception Dimitri Chamblas

Musique et son Eddie Ruscha
Collaboration artistique Amélie Coster

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Photos © Anne-Sylvie Bonnet et © Joana Luz

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