“With its title borrowed from the lexical field of the piano, Fantasie minor came about from the encounter with Chloé Robidoux and Anka Postic, young dancers from Caen. They have been dancing together since childhood, with a background in urban dance (hip-hop, dancehall, house dance), which played a role in their relationship and their construction as individuals.

This piece responds to the proposal of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen en Normandie to imagine a work that can be performed in very different places: with an easily adaptable stage measuring 4 × 4 metres, Fantasie minor can be presented indoors or outdoors, in theatres or gardens, in public squares, and so on. The stage space imposes a constant proximity on the dancers, a factor they have to deal with and negotiate.

This sharing of space between two people is also the challenge of the music in the piece, Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor, op. 103, a composition for piano four hands, in symmetry with the four feet of the dancers in this very limited space.

Because they come from a culture of “battles” and “cyphers”, the two performers constantly reinvent their practice. There is something both fraternal and competitive between them, as if they were continuously responding to the logic of the game. These biographical elements, these youthful reminiscences, run through a choreographic composition inspired by the dances these bodies have studied. As I see it, Fantasie minor is a kind of rite of passage, an idea that is underscored by the Fantasie in F minor, the last piece composed by Schubert before his death at the age of 31, like a premonition of another rite of passage.

The dance engages with this composition with the illustrative approach that urban dances take to music. The performance begins in a virtuoso, almost conquering fashion, but as the choreography progresses, other sensibilities emerge. As if, beyond “conquering the stage and the audience”, the dancers were allowing themselves to feel or reveal a more fragile dimension. The music moves through moods that allow the performers to alternate between these two sensibilities. The hard-toed boots on their feet amplify these variations. Worn like ballet shoes throughout the piece, they give their figures a weightier and more grounded aspect. The duet is built around this contrast between the foot that strikes the ground with force and assurance and the almost crystalline piqué of classical ballet. Absurdity and virtuosity become a springboard for an aesthetic, technical and personal rediscovery.

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Can we talk?

Public-artist conversation after the show.

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Duration: 30min.