I Next

SKALEN Company, Marseille, France, 2004
Author: Michèle Ricozzi

dance/music/video quartet

 I Next is one part of a two-piece production and Xenit is its first part. The performance I Next can be considered as an extension of Xenit, but those two performances can also exist as independent artworks. This choreographic work has been created for a year to explore the body/space relation, the possible extension using instant video pictures. Skalen is concentrated on study of the body memory in our daily life and our illusion to overpower it. In that dance, energetic and fleeting, aesthetic and accomplished, oscillating between visual improvisation and video graphical act, the audience can find the same pleasure they had for Walk About Stalk, the first Skalen's play.
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The dialogue between movement, sound and instant pictures makes a weird and enthralling atmosphere in which audience is invited to trifle with its own perception.
Festival de Marseille 2002

SKALEN, is a community of artists founded in 1999. It presents a space for free expression, where dance, music and video art are the main elements of creation. Even if the main activity of this artistic project is the dance, the other types of expression have a very important role, without an order of importance. Our main concern is the current creation. Our work process in choreographic research is developed in relation to the urban context and in collaboration with various artistic areas, this helps us to explore new directions.
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At the beginning there is no synopsis, no pre-established movements or musical scores, only human experiments, artistic feelings put together to achieve the project. Since 1999 each creation develops a specific choreographic language and explores new directions. (...) The first encounter of dance with Jean Marc Montera’s music is a decisive moment, where the music asks dance about its capacity to exist independently and whether it can establish a relationship, a dialogue. In this writing, these writings, improvisation becomes an expression of self-discipline in the pleasure of being free.
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Our choreographic research contrasts with urban space (from 2000) and the multi-discipline of artistic work with the arrival in 2001 of Patrick Laffont, video artist, enabling us to enter new fields of exploration.
from the company’s documents