The pieces in the Dispositifs series are based on spatial and luminous devices and focus on the visual aspect as well as on the narrative and on movement. As such, they essentially combine visual arts with dance.

The stage device for Vacuum, which was developed progressively, occupies a very narrow space: two 1.2-metre neon lights float horizontally above ground, one atop the other. Both tubes are oriented towards the audience, causing partial blindness and creating a black-hole effect between the two lights. The device makes it look as if the darkness swallows up and spits out the performers. It is a trick that could look like magic but which is used in a totally different manner here.

Choreographic installation

As the lights draw an actual frame, the spectators’ eyes automatically focus on a constantly changing tableau. The way skin reflects the light is of great importance and the light works like a paintbrush that reveals anything it touches: the shadows painted on the muscles and the bones create a moving picture. Also, the specific quality of neon light as it caresses the body, develops a granular effect and a whole gamut of greys.

This has been one of our lines of research on movement, which engenders confusion by instilling doubt as to what is moving, light or the naked performer. The whole method requires highly detailed work on images, on movement and on the rhythm of images. As they successively appear and disappear, the subtlety of the image’s appearance evokes the passage of veiled perception to sharp focus, the transition from image to bas-relief and sculpture, when the contrast is deeper.

With this seemingly very simple method (and unbeknownst to us at first), it is the whole history of art that unfolds in front of our eyes: from illuminated bodies in Renaissance paintings to photo development processes; from leaning bodies painted on Italian church vaults to Brancusi’s abstracted bodies and from sfumato to holograms. The performance exudes some form of lyricism, even if this isn’t what was planned.

The dancers’ ‘fragmented’ bodies, the incongruity of some postures and movements, their unlikeliness, even their monstrosity at times are as many abstract interpretations of the bodies created in front of our eyes, and they are in dialogue with the most concrete entity, namely our own bodies as spectators.

Their nakedness has rarely been as well adorned as it is by light. There is nothing shocking here, and its only purpose is to visually and gloriously defy the void.

As in the earlier shows in this series, it is exploration that determines the content, the choices to be made and the narrative element – in a very broad sense – that might come of it.

Once again, I am working with Philippe Chosson and Pep Garrigues, with whom we have developed great artistic complicity. There is the added bonus that both performers from NEONS have similar shaped bodies and can easily be mistaken one for the other, which offers a multiplicity of opportunities to add to the confusion.

Vacuum is not a quiz for an informed audience. Spectators are free to associate the images they see with those they see within themselves. They’ll walk out slightly unsteady, bedazzled and mute. With Philippe Saire, emptiness is full, wonderfully full.
Mireille Descombes, L’Hebdo’s blog: Polars, Polis et Cie, 26.06.15

Vacuum echoes in the black box of the theatre like a screaming body. Wonderful and unsettling.
Cécile Dalla Torre, Le Courrier, 08.09.15

Despite the white beams, the tableau is not clinical at all. Instead it looks like a magical map of the organism. A whole life unfurls in the wrinkles of the flesh, caught between grace and weightlessness.
Bérengère Alfort, La Terrasse, 14.09.15

• Lausanne-based choreographer Philippe Saire takes us on a mesmerising optical journey. The plateau is bare. On the walls, the half-light echoes off Philippe Chosson and Pep Garrigues to create a different anatomical landscape. Between two neon lights, they literally burst through the screen, like gargoyles on bas-reliefs. Just like a master of Flemish painting or a stone carver, Philippe Saire presents an auditory and (choreo)graphic show where bodies emerge from the darkness as they would in outer space.*
  Unireso, 03.09.15