Forces

Forces

Aszure Barton, Sharon Eyal
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From CHF 17.-
Wed 12 Jun20:00
Fri 14 Jun20:00
Sat 15 Jun20:00
Sun 16 Jun15:00
She clothes herself with strength,
and strengthens her arms.

Proverbs 31 : 17

Infos & Cast

About

Infos & Cast

BUSK

Aszure Barton
Created in 2009 for Aszure Barton & Artists, Sarasota, Florida

STRONG

Sharon Eyal
Created in December 2019 for the Staatsballett Berlin, Germany

12, 14 & 15 June 2024 – 8PM
16th June 2024 – 3PM
Bâtiment des Forces Motrices

On sale on Tuesday 7 November 2023

CAST
BUSK
Choreographer Aszure Barton
Choreographer Assistant Jonathan Alsberry
Costumes Designer Michelle Jank
Sets and Lighting Designer Nicole Pearce
Music August Soderman, Camille Saint-Saëns, Daniel Belanger, Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, Moondog, Slava Grigoryan
Sound Design Aszure Barton

World premiere: Aszure Barton & Artists, October 8th, 2009, Ringling International Arts Festival, Sarasota, Florida, U.S.A.

Created by Aszure Barton & Artists in 2009, BUSK was conceived at The Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara during a residency hosted by Dianne Vapnek’s DANCEworks. The work was then further developed in residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Alberta, Canada). BUSK, in its original form, is an evening length work.

BUSK was originally made possible by generous support from DANCEworks, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Ringling International Arts Festival, with John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in association with the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Additional support also provided by White Oak Conservation Center, the Howard Gilman Foundation and The Canada Council for the Arts

STRONG
Choreography Sharon Eyal
Co-Choreography Gai Behar
Set Designer Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar
Music Ori Lichtik
Lighting Designer Alon Cohen
Costumes Designer Rebecca Hytting

Ballet of the Grand Théâtre

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About

Forces is a double dance bill that brings together two powerful works by two women at the choreographic forefront of our time, who have been invited to recreate these iconic programmes from their respective repertoires with the Geneva Ballet Company

Aszure Barton, an alumna of Canada’s National Ballet School, has been creating dances for over 25 years. She has been guest choreographer in prestigious institutions, such as the English National Ballet to the Nederland Dans Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Her works have been performed at the Paris Opera, New York’s Lincoln Center and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, among others. In BUSK, created in 2010 for the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, Aszure Barton invites us to enjoy the fragility, tenderness, and resilience that exist within the human experience. BUSK is an attentive gaze cast on the physical unfurling of the human psyche to a spirited score. Every facet of the dancers’ bodies and minds are engaged. The dancers must tap into the collective – a hive mind – in order to execute Barton’s layered and intricate choreographic structures which then give way to the nuance of each individual. Deriving its title as much from the Spanish word for search (buscar) as from the English verb for street performance, the performers of BUSK present themselves as they are and invite the audience to enter with them in the search for the inherent wisdom of the body.
> read about Busk by Aszure Barton

First a dancer with the Batsheva Dance Company, Sharon Eyal became its associate artistic director and later resident choreographer. She founded her own company L‑E‑V in Tel Aviv with Gai Behar in 2013. Trepidation, loneliness, strength and resilience are the four characteristics that dominate Sharon Eyal’s choreography of Strong, created with Staatsballett Berlin in 2019, a work that carries the characteristic movements and distinctive music of Eyal’s pieces: a techno soundtrack alternated by drums and bass as lights and movement project an ecstatic experience for seventeen spellbound dancers. Strong develops a magnetism of bodies between the dancers which, as they come closer together, increase the eponymous strength of this performance. Strong is a composition of nervous movements, seemingly exhausting but light and supple. The strength is in the group, but also in the alienation and solitude. The result is emblematic of the cohesion that derives from a common mission or belief. Sharon Eyal’s work is about the shared pleasure that sometimes comes from pain, as the dancers know well, or the pleasure of fighting with the same strength for the same goals.

Introduction

Plage

Forces at La Plage

Public rehearsal 08.06.24

2023-2024

2023-2024 Season

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Photo Credit
© GTG / Marc Asekhame

At the start of my career, I founded my own project (Aszure Barton & Artists) in order to create an autonomous, collaborative platform for process-centered creation. While I also enjoy creating commissioned work for other institutions, it is through building my own projects with my most trusted colleagues that I’ve achieved the most unfiltered expansion in my work, as that is where I feel most free.

I seek to embrace growth and make art that is courageous. With an evolving emphasis on presence and awareness, I aim to cultivate a space where conscious creativity meets regeneration; an inclusive environment where communal energy can thrive. I believe an important part of my job is to respond to what is going on around me.

I see the creation of physical language as an opportunity to recognise and let go of patterns and opinions that no longer serve us well in order to ground ourselves in change and unearth anew. Through a rigorous and detailed collaborative process that I’ve been investigating for years, I have developed a choreographic language that simultaneously respects and dismantles classical and contemporary forms. My love of physicality, my fascination with human behavior and spiritual connection, and a deep appreciation for the power of music is the source of my dance-making. By digging into the humanity of the body, movements of eyes, toes, or tongues are able to contribute to the intricacies of choreographic expression. These nuances are at the root of the contradictory sensibilities I feel compelled to explore, which have been described as humorous, philosophical, raunchy, absurd, honest, rebellious, puzzling, bare, ugly and beautiful in equal measure. On a never-ending quest to reflect the complexities of the human experience, it is really the body’s inherent wisdom, opposed to the intellectual mind, that fascinates me.

In my process, multitasking the body maxes out the mind, generating an extreme awareness or presence. Conversely, the artists are then able to think with the entire body, not just the intellectual mind. This allows me to shift the thinking from duality, mind and body, to everything-ness, the connection between all parts of our minds, bodies, spirits and selves, as well as all other things. I strive to acknowledge our undeniable likenesses through this way of working. It enables me to examine the idea of “seperation” or “individuality” and encourages me to lean into how much more similar we are than different.

I make things because that’s how I make sense out of the world. Choreographing, in a sense, is what allows me to make meaning out of what’s going on around me. I intentionally make dances from a place of not-understanding versus being laser-focused on a fixed point and then manifesting that very specific thing. There’s no room for fear because it suffocates creativity, so I try to allow myself to let go and get curious in the process. I discover things along the way and I ask a lot of questions, so that by the end, when I’ve made something, only then have I figured out what it is (‘well hello thing, it’s nice to meet you!’). For me, it can’t go the other way around.

Also, I just adore dancers.

Music for BUSK

I was drawn to particular pieces of music that aligned with the movement and also elevated themes that came up in the process. It was also a response to the environment we were in; creating in Santa Barbara, the dichotomy of wealth versus the house-less was stark. The truth was right in front of us, the complexities of our own humanness were on display, and it made me question my place as an artist. It also became more, more, and more evident that the physical language we were creating needed to be layered like the humans surrounding us, like the humans we are. Lots of observations. People as birds.

I was drawn to music that captured the sacred, the absurdity, the loneliness, the resilience, the power of grouping and of the individual, and the honesty of what it means to be human and to be an artist, all things I was witnessing around me. Music that I also felt the dancers (incredible humans) were responding to. I chose the music of Moon Dog as he was known for living and creating music on the street – that’s powerful stuff. Ljova’s tunes got right to the heart of mine. And the others’ music too exemplified our inner workings.

Aszure Barton © Graeme Mitchell