Flora Détraz
Flora Détraz is a dancer, choreographer, vocalist and director. After studying ballet at the Boulogne-Billancourt Conservatory, as well as literary and philosophical studies in a preparatory class in Paris, she passed the National Choreographic Centre of Rillieux-la-Pape, under the direction of Maguy Marin. She then completed the choreographic research cycle of the Forum Dança, in Lisbon, a city where she lived for 9 years. During this period, she had the opportunity to meet artists such as Meredith Monk, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Vera Mantero, Meg Stuart or Lia Rodrigues, who inspired her own practice.
Since 2013 and within the company PLI, she has been developing choreographic and vocal projects that explore the links between the visible and the invisible, and that question social conventions through the body.
PEUPLEMENTS (2013), a piece for four female opera singers inspired by a short story by Samuel Beckett, reveals the organisation of a micro-society in a regulated space. The solo GESÄCHT (2014) questions the codes of representation, by declining the figure of a singer. TUTUGURI (2016) features a ventriloquist’s body, prey to its own inner chaos. In MUYTE MAKER (2018), four women, appear like flowering nymphs and captive to a constraining system, sarcastically interpret songs from the repertoire of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The trio GLOTTIS (2021), inspired by surrealist cinema, features sleepwalkers-night birds, seized by delirious visions.
Flora Détraz is currently working on her next creation entitled HURLULA (September 2023), a diptych composed of a film and a performance-concert, around the act of screaming.
As a performer, she has collaborated with Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Laurent Cèbe, Cédric Cherdel, Sara Anjo and Nach.
Production/Administration
Aline Berthou&Charlotte Bayle
aline@aoza-production.com
charlotte.b@aoza-production.com
+336 58 39 78 18
Distribution
Key Performance
Koen Vanhove & Anna Skonecka
koen@keyperformance.se
anna@keyperformance.se
Credits
Gesächt © Pablo Lopez
Tutuguri ©Pablo Lopez
Muyte Maker © Bruno Simao
Glottis © Paulo Pacheco
HURLULA ©Vincent Bosc & Flora Détraz, 2022
Gesächt is a solo piece that explores the idea of the body composed of many other bodies: we are all the bodies that we have imitated, admired, loved, hated. The title Gesächt combines the German words “Gesicht”, meaning the “face”, and “Gestalt”, the “figure” or the “shape”. Flora Détraz embodies a figure of an opera singer, who plays with the performance’s codes: a preparation, an entrance on a stage, a greeting an imaginary pianist, lyrical climax, a greeting the audience. Inspired by the German baritone Dietrich Fisher Diskau and his several performances of the lieder of Schubert, the piece is based on a dialogue between the voice and the movement, both responding to and confronting each other in a captivating duel. The vocal body turns into a vibrant space, where different figures appear and disappear.
Duration : 20 minutes or 50 minutes en diptyque avec le solo TUTUGURI
This solo is often presented as a diptych together with a solo TUTUGURI. For both solos, there are two versions, one with the set, and an in-situ version without any set (for museum, open air spaces, empty stage spaces, etc.). The set is composed of a wall made out of hanging wooden painted cleats that move with the movements of air that come and go through the stage. In GESÄCHT, the set alludes to the essential red stage curtain, before being transformed as an ritual object in TUTUGURI
TUTUGURI is a tribute to the poet Antonin Artaud and to his text Tutuguri, the dark sun ritual, dedicated to the Peyote ritual of the Tarahumara, a group of indigenous people of the Americas.
Based on the dissociation between the voice and the body, this solo becomes a hallucinatory “sound dance”. A woman-medium becomes a live repository, welcoming in her body many voices, beings, identities and stories. This ventriloquist body springs a wide range of sounds: warblings, whispers, fractions of conversations, animal noises, babies cooing or jingling of the aliens.
Duration : 25 minutes or 50 minutes en diptyque avec le solo Gesächt.
This solo is often presented as a diptych together with a solo piece GESÄCHT. For both solos, there are two versions, one with the set, and an in-situ version without any set (for museum, open air, empty stage spaces, etc).
The set is composed of a wall made of hanging wooden painted cleats that move with the movements of air that come and go through the stage. In GESÄCHT, the set alludes to the essential red stage curtain, before being transformed as a ritual object in TUTUGURI.
Through an exploration of medieval images, trivial ditties and grotesque paintings, Muyte Maker celebrates disobedient and irrational bodies. It examines joy as a physical and existential statement: joy as desire and creative potential, going against the grain of morality, and as a physical distortion or contradiction. The four women performers sing copiously, laugh polyphonically, dance blindly, and chat cacophonously, in an attempt to render the full complexity of their own bodies.
GLOTTIS takes place in a cave, in the darkest depths of a cave, in ancestral times, in future times, or even outside of time.
Three big-eyed individuals – somnambulists, blind visionaries, shamans under hypnosis –dedicate themselves to mysterious practices. They communicate with each other in a guttural and rhythmic language that resembles a sound of beatboxing and seem to have a talk with invisible forces. This trio, with the unsetting appearances of a fantastic prophecy, is an oneiric experience through the twists and turns of magic and unconscious. Inspired by the expressionist and surrealist cinema from the beginning of XX st Century, GLOTTIS advocates the occult.
Duration 55 minutes
Between dance, music and film, HURLULA is a project on screaming, composed of two parts: a performance in the form of a choreographed trio concert and a movie about an oracle-woman under prophetic hallucinations.
Combining the French verb « hurler », paroxysmal expression of the scream and « hululer » referring more specifically to the screams of animals at night, HURLULA offers an emotional peregrination in depths of a human body. The piece will be intimist, ecstatic and lunar. It will be a liberating impulse from the shackles of beauty and feminine decorum.