Choreographer and dance researcher Olga de Soto manages to make dance come alive with no live dancers onstage. In Une introduction (revisitée), she introduces the decade-long investigation she has conducted on Kurt Jooss’s emblematic anti-military piece La Table Verte (1932). Based on the archives and testimonies she has collected in about twenty countries, from Germany to Chile, de Soto develops a witty conference exploring the transmission and reception of Jooss’s exceptional work. Setting useful elements of context – rising Nazism in Germany, the Great Depression affecting Europe in the 1930s – the piece truly stands out when it engages with archive images.
Throughout her speech, De Soto passes on printed copies of photos of the Ballets Jooss to the audience to put faces to the dancers’ names. Paradoxically, La Table Verte comes to life on screen, when interviews with the company’s ex-dancers Michelle Nadal, Joan Turner Jara and Françoise Dupuy are shown alongside excerpts of the piece. Despite memory lapses and questions left unanswered, Olga de Soto weaves the story of a nearly 100-year-old dance work that still has much to tell. ●
Callysta Croizer’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
