Skip to main content
Back to search
  • Add to playlist

Paso Doble

Paso Doble

Paso Doble

Strictly speaking neither a show nor a performance, Paso Doble is the long-considered result of the encounter between two artists, the visual artist Miquel Barceló and the dancer and choreographer Josef Nadj. It is an ephemeral work of art, at the crossroads of two fields of experience and two artistic expressions. Where earth, clay has taken root as the point of origin and the protagonist of the confrontation.

To start with, there was the friendship between two men and Josef Nadj’s attentive presence at Miquel Barceló’s workshop. This immersion into his plastic universe and the “amazing opportunity to see works still open and emerging” nurtured in him the rather crazy desire to “enter the picture”. This was the origin of Paso Doble – with, for one man, the challenge of giving substance to his desire and, for the other, the challenge of integrating the presence of a partner and of working in public, in an extremely short time compared to his usual practice. However, Paso Doble is also the attempt to create a plastic work that merges with the very act of his creation. Since the final picture obtained on each reiteration of the experiment is immediately destroyed, erased. And nothing remains of it except in the memory of its direct witnesses or thanks to images such as those gathered in summer 2006 when Paso Doble was presented at the Église des Célestins in Avignon.


Source : Myriam Bloed

Nadj, Josef

Josef Nadj was born in 1957 in Kanjiza, a province of Vojvodina in the former Yugoslavia, in what is today Serbia. Beginning in childhood, he drew, practiced wrestling, accordeon, soccer and chess, intending a career in painting. Between the ages of 15 and 18, he studied at the fine arts high school of Novi Sad (the capital of Vojvodina), followed by 15 months of military service in Bosnia-Herzegovina.


Afterwards, he left to study art history and music at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the University of Budapest, where he also began studying physical expression and acting.


In 1980, he left for Paris to continue his training with Marcel Marceau, Etienne Ducroux. Simultaneously he discovered modern dance, at the time in a period of swift expansion in France. He followed the teachings of Larri Leong (who combined dance, kimomichi and aidido) and Yves Cassati, also taking classes in tai-chi, butoh and contact improvisation (with Mark Tompkins), began himself to teach the movement arts in 1983 (in France and Hungary), and participated as a performer in works by Sidonie Rochon (Papier froissé, 1984), Mark Tompkins (Trahison Men, 1985), Catherine Diverrès (l’Arbitre des élégances, 1988) and François Verret (Illusion comique and La, commissioned by the GRCOP, 1986).


In 1986 he founded his company, Théâtre JEL – “jel” meaning “sign” in Hungarian – and created his first work, Canard Pékinois, presented in 1987 at the Théâtre de la Bastille and remounted the following year at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

Up to now, he is the author of about thirty performances.


In 1982, Josef Nadj completely abandoned drawing and painting to dedicate himself fully to dance, and would not begin showing his work again until fifteen years later. But in 1989 he began practicing photography, pursuing it without interruption to the present. Since 1996, his visual arts and graphic works, most often conceived in cycles or series – sculpture-installations, drawings, photos – have been regularly exhibited in galleries and theatres.


In 2006, Josef Nadj was Associated Artist for the 60th Festival of Avignon, presenting Asobu as the festival's opening performance in the Court of Honour of the Palais des Papes, as well as Paso doble, a performance created in collaboration with the painter Miquel Barcelo at the Celestins Church. In July 2010, he returned to present Les Corbeaux, a duet with Akosh zelevényi.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov, Valery Shadrin, director of the Chekhov International Theatre Festival and Artistic Director of the Year 2010 France-Russia, invited Josef Nadj for the creation of a show dedicated to the playwright, which was performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Josef Nadj was present at the Prague Quadrennial of 16 to 26 June 2011. TheQuadrennial held in Prague since 1967, is the most famous event in the world for performing arts. More than sixty countries attended this year. Josef Nadj was selected to participate in the project "Intersection" based on intimacy and performance. An ephemeral village was created, which consisted of boxes (“white cubes / black boxes") that stood for thirty world-renowned artists, each one represented by a different box. Since 1995, Josef Nadj has been the director of the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans.


Source : Josef Nadj


En savoir plus : http://josefnadj.com/

Paso Doble

Artistic direction / Conception : Miquel Barceló, Josef Nadj

Interpretation : Miquel Barceló, Josef Nadj

Lights : Rémi Nicolas

Costumes : Fabienne Varoutsikos

Sound : Alain Mahé

Other collaborations : Jean-Noël Peignon (poterie)

Production / Coproduction of the choreographic work : Festival d'Avignon, Centre Chorégraphique National d'Orléans

Our videos suggestions
02:42

Têtes à têtes

Villa-Lobos, Maria Clara (Belgium)

  • Add to playlist
04:19

The chance

Touzé, Loïc (France)

  • Add to playlist
01:17:48

Histoire d'Argan le Visionnaire

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:28

Histoire d'Argan-Teaser

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
13:42

La danse de l'épervier

Yano, Hideyuki (France)

  • Add to playlist
32:08

I'm going to toss my arms, if you catch them they're yours

Brown, Trisha (United States)

  • Add to playlist
04:52

Toujours mort, encore vivant

  • Add to playlist
04:44

Y Chwarelwr

Ball, Wren (United Kingdom)

  • Add to playlist
04:00

Tschägg

Eidenbenz, Lucie (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:22

Singspiele

Marin, Maguy (France)

  • Add to playlist
02:51

Admiring la Argentina

Ohno, Kazuo (Japan)

  • Add to playlist
02:34

Folie

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:47

La Natura delle Cose

Sieni, Virgilio (Italy)

  • Add to playlist
01:00:52

Fragments d'Olympe

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
03:20

Fragments of Olympus

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
04:45

RechtsRadikal

Winkler, Christoph (Germany)

  • Add to playlist
06:11

Froufrou

Hominal, Marie-Caroline (Switzerland)

  • Add to playlist
01:08:47

Folie

Brumachon, Claude (France)

  • Add to playlist
06:54

Dark

Carlson, Carolyn (France)

  • Add to playlist
Our themas suggestions

The committed artist

In all the arts and here especially in dance, the artist sometimes creates to defend a cause, to denounce a fact, to disturb, to shock. Here is a panorama of some "committed" choreographic creations.

Parcours

fr/en/pl/

Night ballet

Exposition virtuelle

fr/en/

Why do I dance ?

Social dances, anti-establishment, protest dances, rhythms or identities, rituals or pleasures... There are a myriad of reasons for dancing and a myriad of points of view. A webdoc to discover, enhanced with extracts from performances and accounts from amateurs... all the right reasons for dancing!

Webdoc

fr/en/

Meeting with literature

Collaboration between a choreographer and a writer can lead to the emergence of a large number of combinations. If sometimes the choreographer creates his dance around the work of an author, the writer can also choose dance as the subject of his text.

Parcours

fr/en/

Dance and performance

 Here is a sample of extracts illustrating burlesque figures in Performances.

Parcours

fr/en/

Dance and visual arts

Dance and visual arts have often been inspiring for each other and have influenced each other. This Parcours can not address all the forms of their relations; he only tries to show the importance of plastic creation in some choreographies.

Parcours

fr/en/es/de/pl/pt-pt/

Contemporary Italian Dance : the 2000s

Panorama of contemporary dance practices in Italy during the 2000s.

Parcours

fr/en/

A Rite of Passage

Classical, telluric, shamanic, revolutionary? On May 29th, 1913, the first performance of Nijinski's "Rite of Spring" made such a scandal. This webdoc tells the story of this key work which inspired so many artists.

Webdoc

fr/en/

Genesis of work

A dance show is created in multiples steps between the enunciation of an initial desire which launch the project and the first representation. This parcours presents diff

Parcours

fr/en/

Butoh

On 24th May 1959, Tatsumi Hijikata portrayed the character of the "Man" in the first presentation of a play called Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours).
The Ankoku Butoh was born,

Parcours

fr/en/

Rituals

Discover how the notion of ritual makes sense in various dances through these extracts.

Parcours

fr/en/es/de/pl/pt-pt/
By accessing the website, you acknowledge and accept the use of cookies to assist you in your browsing.
You can block these cookies by modifying the security parameters of your browser or by clicking onthis link.
I accept Learn more