It’s a legend

Like a fairy tale, It's a legend gives younger audiences the opportunity to explore the art of movement in six chapters. From academic classicism at the court of Louis XIV to theatricality in the work of Pina Bausch, Raphaël Cottin's show is a visual book from which emerge some of the greatest choreographic revolutions that transformed the relationship to the stage of artists, but also of audiences. Evoking Isadora Duncan's free dance, Rudolf Laban's pedagogy and analysis of movement, or the abstraction of movement in Alwin Nikolais's work, It's a legend is a modern series in which portraits and practices endlessly echo and contradict each other. Onstage, dance is thought, told, and shown, unless it is doing the telling and showing, jumping from one end of the history of choreography to the other. The desire of this young choreographer, who for the first time will not be dancing in one of his shows, is not only to share the great changes in the history of choreography, but above all to awaken a veritable “thirst for dance.” Alternating poetic and unusual images, It's a legend assures with serious levity that the poetry of movement and the autonomy of the body are linked to those of the mind...

Choreography, text, stage design Raphaël Cottin
Music David François Moreau
Voice Sophie Lenoir
Lights Catherine Noden
Costumes Catherine Garnier
Artistic collaboration Michel Barthaux

With Antoine Arbeit, Nicolas Diguet

Production La Poétique des Signes
Co-production Centre chorégraphique national de Tours, L'Apostrophe Scène nationale de Cergy-Pontoise, La Pléiade La Riche
With the support of Fondation BNP Paribas for the 71st edition of the Festival d'Avignon
With the help of Université François Rabelais de Tours, La Pratique de Vatan, L'Antarès de Vauréal, Centre national de la danse (Pantin)
Co-hosting Festival d'Avignon, CDC Les Hivernales