The project Le corps qui cherche is a journey through the layers of dance memories. Using an ecosomatic documentary choreographic approach, Mélissa Raymond explores the remnants of choreographic works from the perspective of the dancers who performed them, by reactivating the movements they remember: a dance narrative incorporated into the present.
Dancers Nicolas Patry and Kimberley de Jong were invited to summon their memories of choreographic works danced in the past. By revisiting memories of past dances through movement, the dancers use different strategies to allow an updated dance to emerge, creating spaces for reinvention through the act of revisiting. This work of updating invites the spectral presence of choreographers, works, dancers, places, sounds, objects, and gestures to immerse us in a new presence, states of the body, a layered dance.
This project draws on the concept of the body-archive and the emerging field of ecosomatics to identify the particularities of this living archive and its power in the present. Mélissa Raymond seeks to highlight the role of dancers in the persistence of dance (through incorporation) and their ability to reshape their past experience (through excorporation).
The project Le corps qui cherche is an exploratory phase of the research-creation project Chorégraphier les restes: approche écosomatique du corps-archive by doctoral student Mélissa Raymond. It is a way of affirming the resilience of dance in the bodily memory of dancers and celebrating the collective aspect of dance through an ecosystemic vision of creative processes.
