MAGUY MARIN

MAY B

Choreography Maguy Marin

Performers 10 dancers from Compagnie Maguy Marin

Music Franz Schubert, Gilles de Binche, Gavin Bryars

Costumes Louise Marin

Lighting Compagnie Maguy Marin

Duration 1 hour 30 minutes

Created in 1981 / Théâtre Municipal d’Angers

This piece, inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett, whose gestures and theatrical atmosphere stand in contrast to the physical and aesthetic performance of the dancer, enabled us to lay the foundations for a secret deciphering of our most intimate, hidden and overlooked gestures. To detect those tiny or grand gestures among the multitude of almost imperceptible, ordinary lives, where waiting and a stillness that is ‘not entirely’ still open up a void, a vast nothingness, an expanse of silence filled with hesitation.

When Beckett’s characters aspire to stillness, they cannot help moving; whether a little or a lot, they move. In this work, theatrical in its origins, what interested us was not so much developing words or speech, but exploring gesture in its exploded form, searching for the meeting point between, on the one hand, strictly theatrical gestures and, on the other, dance and choreographic language.

Maguy Marin

MAY B Today

by Jean-Paul Manganaro

May B is a distant, remote tale, emerging from a time without an era, a life without order or measure, a tension buried in the reveries of the strange, without memory, without history. The strength and power of May B lie in its ability to tell stories of formative ruptures, of birth and childhood, of grunts and cries, culminating, over the course of its narrative — anti-theatrical through its extreme theatricality — in the reconstruction of a thoroughly expressionist parade.

It is a primal fable of the body and of bodily encounters which, in its rejection of narrative, brings into play a form of wandering through the continuum it creates, allowing the Dionysian to emerge as a means of shaping an unbroken flow of emotion and upheaval, reached through the devilish tail of humour.

At the same time, May B, through the invention of a lyrical-grotesque form, succeeds in redefining what it means to ‘dance’, embracing all the possibilities that dancing offers and bringing them into play in a way that ultimately draws dance back into itself.

And the journey that concludes the action gathers, into a handful of suitcases, the remnants of each person's history as they depart for a destination without a destination. Like the final litany, endlessly repeated in a stammering lament, it binds together and redistributes every fracture: the dancers return to each member of the audience the dreamlike image of Eldorados and Promised Lands, as well as the possible resolutions to a history that drowns all anguish.