Pol Pi
la grotte

la grotte is first and foremost the story of an encounter, or a series of encounters: firstly, an encounter between a body and an environment – the Combarelles cave in Dordogne. In contact with these walls engraved with human and animal motifs over 13,000 years ago, the choreographer Pol Pi experienced a double movement of decentering and widening; within the bowels that go deep into the earth, he felt a call to decipher and incorporate the existence of these multiple presences – to pass on something of what this place has to teach us.

It was also the encounter with Monique Veyret, guide at the Grotte des Combarelles, and her attention to reading these fragile silhouettes, to learning the grammar of the lines laid on the stone by the light of a grease lamp. Here, the back of a lioness, here, the head of a horse, the outline of a stylised female figure – using the reliefs and hollows in the rock. Reading the signs, and all the connections that are established between them, reveals the variety of futures, the constant interweaving of living forms. Using self-induced cognitive trance as a creative tool – to enter into resonance with other states, other voices, other uses of her body – Pol Pi has composed a choreography in the manner of a guided tour. This inner journey takes us both into his self and into the recesses of an imaginary place in the process of taking shape. Every being is multiple, the cave seems to whisper to us as the animal figures reveal themselves, mutate and recompose in his flesh.

Pol Pi invites us on a sensory, sonic and physical journey. His dance gives rise to other forms of existence, other ways of relating to the outside world, and deploys all the metaphors of the cave – secret place, refuge, entrails or womb. As much an archaeological dig as a fertility ritual, la grotte fashions singular creatures, lets voices be heard, and brings worlds into being. Following on from ALEXANDRE and Me too, Galatée, Pol Pi is continuing his exploration of futures, with a desire to disturb the genre beyond the human and to explore the potential for metamorphosis of the body.

– Gilles Amalvi