In a sober and spare universe, a woman sits. She is there, sitting, taking her time. Time for life, time for death. Time belongs to her. A hieratic woman, she watches us, from the depths of time. She observes us, questions us, calls us. Woman of eternity, she is all women. She transforms before our eyes, becomes monstrous, vulnerable, manipulated, frantic. Woman stripped of all her artifices, she becomes woman. Woman of flesh and blood. Alive.

“With this first work, I look to be as close as possible to the human being : in his ardor for life, his vulnerability and fragility before death, in his iconic power before eternity.

Mythical body, broken body, restricted body, absurd body, frenetic body, sheathed body, vegetal body, reverberant body, aberrant body, losing body, monstrous body, body in tension… Numerous bodily states to inhabit in this carnal envelope that is a woman in perpetual mutation.

Because it is indeed mutation and metamorphosis that this first piece examines. Throughout the solo, this woman will live out, undergo, and operate a veritable shedding of skin, leaving behind her all the cast-off rags of the sacred woman. Freeing poetry and fragility, she will be moved by an implacable and inexorable force, the force of the living – the force of death, before which she will beat her head, extract herself, be pinned, lifted, constrained, and from which she will escape.

Protean woman, something in her founders, unwinds, transforms, little by little allowing a humanity to appear, a calming, an abandon. In perpetual oscillation between lightness and oppression, between light and obscurity, between terror and astonishment, this woman will sound out the mystery and strangeness of living.

In this piece, there are situations, tensions, silences, outbursts, secrets, absences, disappearances, aberrations, mutations.” —Maxence Rey

Explorer of a nuanced body, Maxence Rey is particularly inspired by the boundary zones between dance and theater. Before devoting herself exclusively to dance, she worked as the dance coordinator and programmer at Mains d’Œuvres, and even earlier, as a project manager for a computing company. Motivated to cooperate in artistic collaborations, she regularly works with Isabelle Esposito : the Les Semeurs company, Olivier Comte : Les Souffleurs – commandos poétiques, Nicole Mossoux and Patrick Bonté : the Mossoux-Bonté company, Christian Bourigualt : l’Alambic co., and Séverine Delbosq : l’Essoreuse co. She also crosses the universes of Geisha Fontaine and Pierre Cottreau : Mille Plateaux Associés, Kataline Patkaï : Patkaï Company, and Marion Coutarel : Théâtre de la Remise. Alongside her work with dance, she also pursues vocal exploration with the feminine polyphonic reading trio Vox Libris, initiated by Frédérique Bruyas, and deepens her corporal investigations through her training in Qi Gong, an internal Chinese art, with Laurence Cortadellas and Jean-Michel Chaumet/Zhi Rou Jia : the School of Development of Softness.

© Fabien Agnesina