Dance at the Lille Opera

Ever since the Lille Opera's reopening in December 2003, dance has played a major role here: Each season, the program reflects today's big esthetic trends, with major stagings by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz, Jiří Kylián, Trisha Brown, Maguy Marin, Merce Cunningham, and William Forsythe. The Lille Opera also supports creativity through its artistic residencies, thereby putting into practice the institution's aspiration to work harder at establishing a close lin

Like a kind of mechanical ballet, Mon Amour is an encounter between seven dancers—wearing costumes that are half sportswear and half Victorian—and seven spheres which are digitally guided across the stage. Three musicians—Gérôme Nox, Bruno Chevillon, and Didier Ambact—and a singer complete this moving tableau, designed as an artificial, cosmic architecture.

With L’oubli, Toucher du Bois, Christian Rizzo questions the presence of bodies in an enclosed space, the walls of which are formed of raw materials and act as surfaces for light and sound to echo off. He entrusted the musical composition to Sylvain Chauveau, whose piano is combined with discrete electronic touches.

Choreographer in residence from 2013 through 2015, Daniel Linehan seeks to softly blur the boundaries separating dance from everything else. He approaches creativity from the perspective of a curious amateur, testing out the many interactions between dance and forms of non-dance, seeking out unlikely convergences, juxtapositions, and parallels between texts, movements, images, songs, videos, and rhythms.

dbddbb features five dancers moving at the same pace, each in relation to the others, and reciting sound poems in rhythm. Here, Daniel Linehan is interested in the rhythm of their steps and slogans, which are replaced by Dadaist poems, to create a form of choreography in perpetual progress, "a polyrhythmic sound landscape produced live on stage."