Fanny Brouyaux: To be schieve or a romantic attempt

“To be schieve or a romantic attempt” is a solo work-in-progress by dancer and choreographer Fanny Brouyaux. The piece explores the different aspects and ambivalences of the romantic movement and its parallels with the punk movement. Accompanied by a carefully chosen soundtrack by composers such as Tchaikovsky and Paganini, the dancer tries to face this imposing heritage by immersing her (resolutely contemporary) body in the music of these great artists. Waves, suspensions, lyrical flights, vibrato – she goes through the palette of tensions and states of mind and body that underlie their compositions. She is interested in the traces and impacts that this artistic movement has left on her body as a contemporary woman, as well as in the context in which this artistic movement was born and how it may or may not echo our current times.

The project is interested in the visceral aspect of the romantic movement: the heartstrings. It is mainly a work of presence and rhythmic control of the physical and mechanical tensions of different emotional states: the emergence of a sob, the restraint, the technicality of the tremor, the spasm, the voluntary and/or involuntary muscle contractions. The interpreter plays the game of listening to his ‘instrument-body’ and subtly composes the sensations, the waves. An ex-amateur cellist, Brouyaux brings back to the surface of her body the traces and sensations of her instrumental practice: vibrato, bow strokes, volumes, materials, resonance box, pizzicato. The spectator is invited to attend the spectacle of the musician's dancing body, sometimes freed from her instrument, sometimes enhanced by the sound. This work extends her research “2Schieve,” a project on the musician’s body and the links between the romantic and the punk movement, initiated in collaboration with the Liège-based drummer Tom Malmendier.