SHAZAM 2.0.2.1

Five years after the Olympics Ceremonies which gave him worldwide recognition, Philippe Decouflé staged the Opening Ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the International Film Festival in Cannes, a show that foreshadowed a future production, Shazam!, created the following year, in 1998. This production was presented as a series of experimentations about cinema (theframe,Movement decomposition, light etc.). Very innovative at the time Shazam! was presenting dancers interacting with their images on pre-recoded films, live video and mirrors. Considered by many as one of Philippe Decouflé's masterpiece, this show has been given more than two hundred times in France and abroad. In 2021, Philippe Decouflé decided to staged Shazam again, with most of the original cast.
With this revival, we are hoping that creation will come from a place of loyalty, the way differences emerge in rehearsal. Going back to this piece was also a way to examine the changes in the dancers' bodies, as well as their ways of seeing the work and their aesthetics. This revival also poses a singular question: positing that dance is a truly ephemeral art, created on the fragile, changing bodies of its performers ? what can we find in these works from the past? Finding means coming back together, transformation, inevitable and tragic losses and the re-inventing of certain elements. There is memory as well as forgetfulness: phrases from the past now danced with new bodies. Even though the body's cells are constantly renewing themselves, dance only happens in the present, in the now. Reviving Shazam is an opportunity to try answering several questions which keep coming up in dance: its transmission, its likelihood of lasting through time: how do we fill in the bits that are missing ? How does an aging body work with dances which were created on a significantly younger body ? How do we replace the irreplaceable ?