Look out, open your eyes! With this new work for four dancers, the Brazilian choreographer who sees everything invites you to see the question of ‘seeing’ differently. Starting from the eye and embracing all that is globular, like the sun, the egg, the moon or the arena, Volmir Cordeiro has created a dance that expresses the functions of the eye and then evokes its physicality and actions – crying, staring, winking, spying, etc. The eye is a tool for exploring interiority, latency, the pre-human, the tactile, the animal, the excitement of thought, and darkness and intensity. With this new work, Volmir Cordeiro is seeking to make ‘the eye that searches dance, the one that will look for the invisible, deep, hidden, mysterious mass of the world. That’s what I call the rest; the thing without a name, which cannot be looked at, subterranean, lost and unattainable; this matter capable of making us close our eyes and then cry out inside, and open our sight towards what we dare not look at. Dancing a dance that is embodied by the eye, dancing what the eye is unable to retain when it is in the process of looking, dancing what is left over in us, forgotten, rejected, set aside, dancing the obsessive fear of what one sees.’ Like Volmir Cordeiro’s previous works, L’œil la bouche et le reste is a flight into abstraction, life and the world, a dense, almost obsessive search during which nothing is ever left to chance.

Born in 1987, Volmir Cordeiro first studied theatre before working with Brazilian choreographers Alejandro Ahmed, Cristina Moura and Lia Rodrigues. He joined the “Essais” (Tests) course in 2011, at the National Centre for Contemporary Dance in Angers, under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh. In November 2018, he defended his doctoral thesis on marginal figures in contemporary dance at Paris 8 University, which is to be published in 2019. He has performed in pieces by Xavier Le Roy, Emmanuelle Huynh, Vera Mantero and Latifa Laâbissi, etc. 

In 2012, he choreographed and performed his first solo in France, Sky, then another, Inês in 2014 and in March 2015, the duo Epoch with Marcela Santander Corvalán. He completed his first cycle of works, composed of three solos including Sky and Inês, with Street, created in October 2015 at the Louvre Museum, in collaboration with the Paris International Contemporary Art Fair, FIAC. In February of 2017, he created a piece for four dancers, The Eye the Mouth and the Rest in Brest. In September of 2019, he created a piece for six performers, Trottoir, in  Festival Actoral - Marseille. 

He teaches regularly in choreography programmes, such as P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, the Exerce Master (ICI-CCN Montpellier, France) and the Drama Master (Kask Conservatorium, Gand, Belgium). Volmir Cordeiro was an associated artist at the Ménagerie de Verre in 2015, and has been an associated artist at the National Dance Centre (CND) in Pantin since 2017. He is also a resident research artist at Ateliers Médicis, in Clichy-sous-bois.

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).