Compagnie Humaine (France)
www.compagniehumaine.com

Founded in 2003 by Eric Oberdorff, internationally renowned choreographer, Compagnie Humaine is a French independent contemporary dance company, developing projects bringing together freelance artists from various disciplines: dancers, composers, filmmakers, visual artists, stage and costume designers, photographers, writers. Audiences and critics use the same word to describe the artistic work of the company, "human", as its choreography and its movement show - even confront - all the contradictory energies that drive us: poetry and violence, weight in the ground and absolute lightness, softness and sharpness, strength and tenderness.

“...Eric Oberdorff works on a stage of pain which is often left over, before which many performances often stop. The one which comes after the pain, from the reconstruction, whether intimate or collective. The time of the scar, this magic stage when it closes and becomes trace, and sometimes ornament...”
– Eve Beauvallet, Mouvement magazine (France)

Touring Programs

The Compagnie Humaine offers 3 evening length pieces from its repertoire. Each piece listed below shows a different aspect of the company's versatile choreographic work (movement, theatricality, video) and is performed by a combination of dancers, actors and/or live musicians. 

Un autre r�ve am�ricain (Another American Dream)
Tours with 5 dancers – 5 performers total - (duration: 50 minutes)

"...Oberdorff’s dream of America is a nightmare that only poetry makes fit to live in. His dance is a theater of images, minimalist, it goes straight to the point. The texts are strong as well as the pictures..." - La Marseillaise

Choreographer Eric Oberdorff questions in his creation ANOTHER AMERICAN DREAM about those left behind by the "American way of life". In a scenery designed like in a Tennessee Williams' play, a theatrical dance tells the fragility of those who life has not spared, as found in the writings by Charles Bukowski, Walt Whitman, Sam Shepard, Jim Harrison: exacerbated bodies, descendants of the marathon dancers of "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" A dance with the rock spirit that animated Patti Smith when she wrote the early 80's Democratic anthem: "People have the power".


Leviathan
Tours with 5 dancers, and 1 actor - 6 performers total - (duration: 70 minutes)

The central theme of LEVIATHAN is the disappearance of water and features five dancers and one actor in a state of emergency. Designed as a forerunner tale of an inexorable disaster, the piece is not narrative in the usual sense. It sets on stage beings stemming from an imaginary and timeless society (any resemblance would be purely coincidental...!) doomed to disappear and who throw a last glance at their surroundings: a glance in turn fun, distant, questioning, cynical, curious, restless, full of tenderness or anger, religious, incredulous … The texts are mainly excerpted from the novel Moby Dick by H. Melville, using its symbolism and its central theme, the place of man in the universe.


Butterfly Soul
Tours with 2 dancers, and 1 musician - 3 performers total - (duration: 45 minutes)

Work commissioned by the 2011 Cannes Dance Festival, BUTTERFLY SOUL explores and relates the state of fragility of the artist when creating. His mind works then like a butterfly flies, disordered and in random from one idea to another, between hesitation and dazzling speed. It also has its beauty, trying to resist the wind and the doubt, pushed forward by an uncontrollable urge. But when taking a step back, one can see that this flight, which seems erratic, makes sense. Whatever its detours, the butterfly is moving towards a mysterious destination, only he knows about.