Music: Kaija Saariaho & Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Choreography: Jean-Claude Gallotta

General conception of the visual: Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Image realization: Pierre-Jean Bouyer

Video & regie: Isabelle Barrière

Dancers of Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble

Jean-Claude Gallotta, Mathilde Altaraz,

Darrell Davis, Ludovic Galvan, Benjamin Houal,

Yannick Hugron, Ximena Figueroa, Hee-Jin Kim,

Kae Kurachi, Massa Sugiyama, Thierry Verger

Percussions: Thierry Miroglio

Premiered at Grenoble, November 2003

A man (Jean-Claude Gallotta) questions his reflection in a mirror. The reflection of a woman (Mathilde Altaraz) superimposes itelf. He attemps to follow her on the other side of the mirror, searches for her face among all the characters he encounters and all the situations he crosses. This mirror indeed does not send back a slavish reflection, it is an interpreter, it exists by iself, has a life of its own. Its images are transforming all the time, and let perceive an other side, beyond the mirror, in which everyone is projected. The mirror then becomes a gate, opening on territories

where protagonists find themselves transported. These worlds, oniric and sensual, make them to discover japanese gardens, chinese rivers, improbable spaces inhabited by our fantasms of the other : the ghosts of time.

At a time, the mirror duplicates itself, and the two mirrors enter in communication one with the other, each person in front of a mirror seing the other through his own reflection. The man and the woman, facing the mirrors, communicate through image, gesture and music. Each one dance with the other whose image is projetected on the mirror/screen. This real/virtual duo explores many registers of communication, verbal and non verbal, gestural and musical, as many fragments of a loving discourse obsessed by absence and distance.

The show proceeds in a continuous musical braid consisting of five parts. Three of these musical moments are composed of pre-existing pieces for percussions and electronics : Six Japanese Gardens and Trois Rivières by Kaija Saariaho, and Time Dusts by Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

Two other moments are represented by a purely electronic premiere by J.B. Barrière, Time Mirrors, composed in two parts, articulated with the three other pieces. Time Mirrors is a work specially conceived and created for the show, including the moments of interactions of the dancers with the electronic mirrors, where they attempt to talk to each other, to join each other.

Six Japanese Gardens, Time Dusts, and Trois Rivières constitute these distinct  moments, formally and by treatment, where the dancers are passing through the mirrors, which became gates, discover the other, the others, without mediation, and depart together towards the exploration of physical but also spiritual new territories, new spaces. With Six Japanese Gardens, they explore the formal beauty of japanese gardens. With Trois Rivières, they are carried away by the chinese poet Li Po evokating « a moon light on the river ». With Time Dusts, haunted by an immemorial poem, they question the separation between dream and reality.

Ritual of metamorphosis where nine dancers, a couple, a percussionnist and two electronic mirrors, explore the liquid borders between identity and alterity. Ritual of communication and exchange, between one and the other, here and there, which music, dance and image with computer, are developping together.

Coproduction 38ème Rugissants / Image Auditive, Centre Chorégraphique national

de Grenoble / Quai des Arts. With participation of Hexagone, Scène nationale

de Meylan and of Cargo / Maison de la Culture de Grenoble.

Thanks to Acroe and to Muriel Von Braun.