Au-delà

Dance connects us with the absent. Armed with this conviction, DeLaVallet Bidiefono treats bodies and voices as channels to a beyond. Deep voices and vibrant bodies summon the dead, who are so numerous in the Republic of Congo, in an attempt to share this necessarily singular relationship with disasters and disappearances. In Brazzaville, where he has lived for over ten years, death is omnipresent. After years of civil war, it still appears brutally, in accidents causing hundreds of victims, or more silently, as a consequence of poverty, malnutrition and the absence of an efficient health system. In his new creation, DeLaVallet Bidiefono aims to dramatize this disastrous companionship and the impact it has on the daily lives of his fellow citizens. A daily routine punctuated by six days of funeral wakes, during which grief is expressed in laughter and tears. Six days during which people enter into a trance so that the deceased can express themselves. Death is tragic, of course, but it also offers the artist an enemy to defy. RB (Festival d'Avignon 2013)