La mémoire de l’eau

Mist drifting across an empty swimming pool as the audience enters barefoot; slightly perturbed, mostly charmed, by this already atypical experience. Then come the dancers. Four serene, dark-clad women who pace to the far side of the water and, each in her own space, start to move. Varying combinations of 1, 2, 3 and 4 perform sections of water-inspired choreography, as the untouched swimming pool offers up perfect reflections at their feet, four upside-down figures who join the dance. There is no physical contact between bodies or with the water, until at last the separation is broken by a splash, and the pensive mood becomes playful.

We shift to a different pool; shallower, smaller, more intimate. Here, the dancers slip all the way into the water and we can see their facial expressions as they give in to the splash-fight delight of childhood. The tone shifts again when a game of climbing out and falling into the pool intensifies until it is no longer a game. Blood seeps into the water and all of a sudden the dancers are drowning, gasping, flailing, one after another, again and again, before they re-emerge as fantastic marine monsters.

We come back to the large swimming pool for a sequence with an immense length of white cloth that shrouds, engulfs, connects – a sail? a veil? or the representation of a wave that undulates between the dancers, sometimes obscuring, sometimes overwelming them. At last it is heaped into sculptural mounds along the pool’s edge, and the dancers slide into the water to float motionless, lifeless or just peaceful. Heavy silence falls until, timid then tumultuous, the applause erupt.