8 feet dance

Performance-show, 60 min, 2024
Performers – Anna Chirescu, Cathy Gringelli, Violaine Lochu, Yael Miller
Makeup – Céline Régnard
Sound and light – Baptiste Joxe
Photos – Nuage ZD
Scenography technique – Spero Djivo-Lochu
Residency support – CND, Pantin / Montevideo-Actoral, Marseilles / La Dynamo- Banlieues Bleues, Pantin
Production La Pop, Paris

An ecofeminist fable, 8 feet dance is a “sprawling” performance combining vocal polyphony, choreographic gestures and visual arts. It revolves around a fiction: in an undetermined future, a community of octopus women lives in self-sufficiency. Resulting from laboratory research, they have survived strong global warming and watch over other resilient species.

The performance gives voice to songs linked to ordinary life – waking up, prayer, washing, self-defense exercises, meals, etc. – of these guardians of the living, but also vocalized rites of preservation, fertility and empowerment. Both written and improvised, these pieces explore the entire vocal spectrum, from sung voice to extended voice; glottal sound, rumbling, yodeling, ululation, crosstalk, cry, whispering… Indeed, the language of this futuristic female community consists of a sort of ‘interspecies Creole’, between human voices and sounds from the marine universe: dolphin whistles , clicks of sperm whales, ‘technological’ sounds (sonars or others)…Violaine Lochu and her team guide us through these siren songs, accompanied choreographically and visually by the figure of the octopus, a fascinating animal with incredible chromatic and mimetic properties.

8 feet dance is an experimental cyborg opera, crossed by the force of sorority, spirituality and re-enchantment.