“This installation, loosely inspired by the jukebox and Scopitone, takes the form of four screens showing sixteen video clips, all illustrating love songs. These brief stories, which are choreographic, visual and musical at the same time, are performed by the protagonists: four singer-dancers and a joker animateur. Taking up this theme of love, the bodies appear in turn as pop rock icons, in a transformation, organic dissolution even, a multitude of images and moods evocative of the feeling of love. 

A song, and in three minutes, there you are…Carried away. You croon, you hum, you jig about, a whole imaginary world opens up to you. A suspended state, an interruption of reality, a quick injection and you're off again. The effectiveness of a rhythmic concentrate, lightweight or serious, reconciles by sleight of hand, or a swaying sashay, desire, pleasure and satisfaction. It does no harm, it helps, it stimulates, it stretches and unlocks. Simply complex, it touches you and “step by step” it stirs you. And all this mish-mash, cash-and-carry of tunes, chords following discords, also builds the edifice of our imaginary museum “So long as baby…love and songs will be”. A nickelodeon which hops and pops… A song and dance machine, a sort of jukebox or Scopitone. There are sixteen titles which you can choose to listen to and watch. Just one, or two, three, four, just as you please, in any order you like.”

Source: Hervé Robbe

Born in Lille in 1961. After studying architecture for a few years, Hervé Robbe set his sights on dance. He was principally trained at Mudra, Maurice Béjart's school in Brussels. He began his performing career dancing the neo-classical repertoire, then went on to work with various modern dance makers.

In 1987 he founded his company: le Marietta secret.

The course of his career is clearly founded on a constant renewal of his choreographic writing. Supported by loyal artistic collaborators, his work has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, associating the dance presence with visual, sound and technological worlds. His projects, polysemic works, take many forms: frontal performance, ambulatory shows and installations.

The place of the audience, its presence and view is decisive; the stage space is regularly called into question.

His arrival at the CCN (National choreographic Centre) of Le Havre Haute-Normandie offered more opportunities for his research.

In 1999 he composed his autobiographical solo Polaroïd. Within it, video images of places associated with his childhood appear and coexist with an uninterrupted physical display.

In 2000 he explored the theme of home with Permis de construire – Avis de Démolition, a diptych consisting of an installation and a performance. He went on to tackle the theme of the garden in 2002 with Des Horizons Perdus.

In a world constructed with screens – virtual containers for the body, evokers of death – in the duet REW he engaged in a dialogue between man and woman on the theme of suicide. In 2004, with the group piece Mutating Score, he returned to the idea of the performance area being a common space occupied by both audience and dancers. This installation-dance, while reaffirming this conviction about the force of movement, marks the culmination of a project on the use of new technologies, which are integrated into the show in real time.

In 2006 he designed the installation So long as baby...love and songs will be, a kind of manifesto of the preoccupations which underlie his work. The device is a containing structure in which the audience is invited to watch and listen to the dancer-singers present on screen. Hervé Robbe distanced himself from the stage with this, then returned to it in the works Là, on y danse in 2007 and Next days in 2010.

While maintaining his personal approach in his own productions, he regularly accepts commissions from the Opéra de Lyon, the Gulbenkian Ballet, the CNSMDP (Paris Conservatoire) and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Source: Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre Haute-Normandie