Trajal Harrell

New York choreographer Trajal Harrell produces work that includes smart and sensual declarations on minimalist dance companies, and is not timid about displaying great emotions. For his ‘Twenty Looks’ series he rediscovered the dance style and the attitude of the Vogue dancers and received international acclaim from audiences and critics alike. With CAEN AMOUR he sounds the bell for a new chapter in his oeuvre. His historic crucial turning point is the legendary dance and art nouveau icon Loïe Fuller, who has already been an inspirational muse for poets and painters including Stéphane Mallarmé and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Her dance, wrapped up in flowing garments and inspired by Oriental concepts, was simultaneously avant garde and Vaudeville in nature and was posthumously hailed as modern dance. In CAEN AMOUR Loïe Fuller meets Tatsumi Hijikata, who is best known in the Western world as the founder of the Butoh dance style, which is in turn strongly influenced by modern dance. On the interface of dance, history and Orientalism, Harrell is predominantly interested in one thing: the pure urge to dance in a time in which the categories of dance must first be discovered. So emerges a crossroads of contemporary hoochie coochie show, fashion show and dance laboratory, stage and catwalk, historical summary and museum artefacts.