Morphose Company - "Barry is not completely white"
 2015, 48mn05
 digital, color
 Choreographer: Soraya Thomas

Distribution : Mariyya Evrad, Orlando Rodriguez, Maeva Curco-llovera.

Music : Loan Livest. 

Light : Nicole Leonforte
 Resource provided by: Lalanbik, crdc

"The  body, the seat of our emotions, can be transformed, ugly, beautiful,  hard, gentle… , it can make visible the invisible of our states of  souls. Body matter is a matter in motion over time, nothing freezes,  everything shifts and fails to find that unstable balance. " - Soraya  Thomas

Barry  is not completely white is a fantastical danced response to the  misconception that the family unit is governed by roles assigned to each  according to gender. One of the researches was made around the myth of  Plato "androgynous". According to Plato, in the beginning there were  three kinds of men: women, men and androgynes. As they were strong and  too bold for the gods, for they wanted to reach the heavens, Zeus  decided to weaken them by splitting them in two.

After  many oppositions imposed by religion, science at times and politics for  centuries in our western lands, the return to a notion of  complementarity and respect for difference through access to equal civil  rights for all , seems to be still difficult. One  of the directions of the piece is to express the constant need of the  human being to be emotionally connected with the other, the attachment  of the bodies, beyond his gender by structuring a movement in succession  then in relay between the interpreters.

Source : Morphose

Trained at the Conservatoire d'Annecy (direction: Jean-Marc Boitière),  Soraya Thomas obtained her State Diploma in dance education in 2000,  before joining the company Coline, professional insertion cell for young  contemporary dancers. There she met Jeanclaude Gallotta, Michel  Kéléménis and Myriam Burns, for whom she took on roles. In 2002, she  arrived at La Réunion where she met the choreographer Eric Languet. With  him, she participated in the projects Interludes, Faux-ciels and  L'Esprit et la ruche, and danced in Chemins faisant, On était tous là  pour s'aider et Somewhere, out there, life was screaming. In 2007, she performed her first choreography in William Shakespeare’s  Le Songe d'une nuit d'été for the Sakidi company, before signing her  first play.

Created by Soraya Thomas in 2011 in La Réunion, the company Morphose  places contemporary dance, the sound universe and the intersection of  artistic disciplines at the center of its projects. She explores the  link between intimate space and public space in a work of choreographic  creation based on the centre, succession, relationship to the other and  space. The urban space and the street are the place of the daily  contemporary movement, so dear to the choreographer. The process is to  give them back what they offer us every day: inspiration. We dance on  the asphalt that we walk every day without paying attention to it, here  we tell with the bodies. The bodies work in volume, anchorage and  ability to react with everyday life. Each of Morphose’s creations involves talented performers and creators. Their collaboration gives rise to singular works where the work consists in bringing societal questions to the stage. It is a question of starting from the real, from the concrete, to tend towards a choreographic and aesthetic transposition. It results from strong and living pieces, in which humanity is at the heart of artistic purpose. Dance is purely and simply an art of the living, it touches the intimate and makes it universal. The energies speak for themselves. With  duality, poetry, humanity and animality, through a streamlined  movement, the Morphose dance tells us about life, about others with  others, and takes us into a spiral as rock as delicate, to offer a dance  to the public, and to deposit on these common places, for a moment,  another look.