Noos

Acrobatic performers Justine Berthillot and Frédéri Vernier premiered their latest collaboration, ‘Noos’, at the Solstice festival in Antony this past June. Poignant in its simplicity, ‘Noos’ formalises that most essential experience: the physical encounter. Although the most obvious connotation is present to an extent, the piece isn’t overtly sexual. In an unspoken dialogue of impacts, frictions, and attractions – the performers are not so much a man and a woman as they are two autonomous bodies: grazing against one another, meeting and resisting. In this sense, the piece is less about romantic love than it is about our relation to the unknown and unknowable Other. Whenever a dancer’s body seems on the point of fixing into a particular posture or attitude, it rears up and transforms completely. Accompanied by Antoine Herniotte’s delicate soundtrack, ‘Noos’ is an elegy to restlessness, a poetic précis of all the tensions and ambiguities likely to exist between two people.