Premiere US Premiere
Country of Origin France
Description A brilliant, media-savvy showman with the soul of an anarchist and the sensibility of a vaudevillian, French choreographer Philippe Decouflé merges dance, live video, film, music, and cartoons to form an antic alliance that blurs the boundaries between the virtual and physical. An immensely popular artist who made his initial splash at the opening ceremonies for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville (featuring synchronized bungee-jumpers and dancers surreally done-up as snowglobes), Decouflé has produced a body of work inspired by the wild acrobatics of the circus, the playful formality of Bauhaus and Russian constructivism, the trip-the-light-fantastic pyrotechnics of modern-dance pioneer Alwin Nikolais, and the zeitgeist-alert physicality of Pina Bausch.
Shazam!, an ebullient spectacle that grew out of a commission for the 50th Cannes Film Festival, shimmers with Decouflé's kaleidoscopic imagery. Giant screens, monitors, and mirrors capture, reflect, and meld with the dancers, who, whether flouting gravity or deferring to its pull, conjure a world at once otherworldly and deeply human.
Identifier 2001s.00717
