Teresa Silva
Enjoy the Weather as a choreographic research run by Teresa Silva, the Portuguese choreographer and dancer, during a residency in Marseille (at Montevideo). Today it is a film which exemplifies what can be achieved through the unique combination of moving image and moving body arts. The starting point is a reading of The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia. The philosopher adopts the point of view of plants to devise a new understanding of the world as a living system linking all beings – animate and inanimate. This hypothesis is embodied in a succession of tableaux in which four dancers lend their gestures to new relationships with image and sound. A red thread weaves a web between bodies with a floating presence, in a courtyard swept by gusts of wind. Four voices, voice-overs but in situ, take turns to read a strange ecological fairytale, in which the narrative unravels a hodgepodge of non-human beings interacting with the seasons and variations in the weather. On screen, two men and two women wander through the space, moving their arms hypnotically, as if their movements are reeling the invisible thread of the story in and out. In the next tableau, hands mirror their gestures to animate a still life. Fluctuations in superimposed images, variations in shadow and colour filters: infinite artistic variations affect the bodies and disturb their relationship to space. « School could be everything. Everything could be the school”, so began the tale. What is offered here to our astonished senses is nothing less than a utopian dream of universal teaching. (Cyril Neyrat)