BARRE, featuring Marie-Agnès Gillot directed by Charlotte Dauphin.

The prima Ballerina, Marie-Agnès Gillot gracefully performs a dance around a sculpture in a new short film from Charlotte Dauphin.

Beyond mere performance, the film delves into a profound narrative, with the sculpture mirroring deep emotions and psyche. 

Marie-Agnès, personifying this feeling, channels and liberates her feelings through her dance, alongside the art piece. The atmosphere is amplified by the signature music of Mirwais. 

Dance meets sculpture, meets film and Charlotte Dauphin acts as the creator of this singular piece of total art as a writer, choreographer, actor, sculptor and filmmaker in a hybrid artform. 

Barre displays Dauphin’s hybrid approach to art as a sign system. In the film, dance, sculpture and poetry are used as a layered, meaningful multi-disciplinary instrument.

Barthes mentions “…patterns of behavior can mean, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture.” Dauphin’s own mixture subverts, expands, and challenges the traditional vocabulary expected of the performer’s body in dance, or in film. The body is not limited to physical shapes, gestures, postures, tempo, pace, repetition, or to its specific relationship to time and space, traditionally encountered in dance. 

Dauphin borrows to drama and fine arts by adding emotions, personality, voice, theatrical embodiments, and interactions with the artwork. They are equally important elements in the edification of her own semiotics, in a similar way to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater. The meaningful movements create situations, shape dramatic moments, while replacing traditional plot by a succession of repetitive expressionist gestures, deployed by Marie-Agnès Gillot and her interactions.

Dauphin builds a liminal performative edifice that becomes a ‘dramatic’ choreography. The dancer acts and the actor dances. Dauphin’s semiotics is the threshold of dance, drama and fine arts. It does not belong to any of them, and yet it belongs to them all. 

ROD

A film directed by Charlotte Dauphin

Starring Marie-Agnès Gillot

Production: Marignan Films – Dauphin Films

Co-Production: Rosalie Mann, Mann & Miller

Music: Mirwais

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