TO ABOUT
The FluO company was born in 2015 from the initiative of the Russian dancer and choreographer Nadia Larina and the musician, poet and singer Bastien Fréjaville, as a pretext for choreographic and musical experimentation. The company started with the creation of a short piece for a dancer and a singer "Imaginary Girl" and "City body", one piece for four dancers and four live musicians. In 2017, choreographer Nadia Larina decided to return to her Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet roots to create La Zone, a choreographic solo inspired by the world of filmmaker Andreï Tarkovski and Russian poet Vladimir Vyssotsky.
Choreographic approach
The FluO company pursues an objective of decompartmentalizing contemporary dance: to invite to see a mixture of styles, of corporealities which are built in the fluid dance, but committed and acrobatic with a touch of the assumed theatricality and a strong musicality.
The dance of the choreographer Nadia Larina, influenced by her Slavic culture and the choreographers and artists with whom she works as a performer (Carole Vergne, Faizal Zeghoudi, Jean-Paul Goude, Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubeck), juggles with games of weight, balance and imbalance, with the elasticity of the disarticulated movement which is projected and occupies space and time in a particular rhythmicity.
The search for personal dance movement, the quest for an identity, means and tools of scenic expression, existential questions are at the heart of the activity of the company FluO which pursues an objective of creating committed shows, involving a strong and poetic message.
Nadia larina began his artistic career in Russia at the age of 15 after studying multidisciplinary dance (traditional and classical, ballroom and jazz). Nadia came to France in 2008, through her political (she studied at Scienes Po Bordeaux) and artistic commitment (she perfected herself with choreographers of contemporary French dance with some of them, she subsequently worked in France (Carole Vergne , Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubeck, but also Faizal Zeghoudi, Alain Marty, Emmanuelle Grizot), and throughout the world (Royal Opera of Wallonia, the Tel Aviv Opera, Kyoto and Tokyo with Jean-Paul Goude). Nadia creates her own shows within the FluO company which she co-founded with the musician Bastien Frejaville. During her artistic career, she met the world of the choreographer Maguy Marin, of the Hofesh Shechter company and Alain Platel, of Jan Fabre and Teodorus Terzopoulos. She obtained her State Diploma as professor of contemporary dance at the Center National de danse de Pantin in Paris in April 2017 and has since intervened as a guest artist in various structures (Conservatoire de Bordea ux, Municipal School of Guyancourt, College of Montlieu, Center Hospitalier de Cadillac and others).
Bastien Fréjaville is a poet, musician, author, composer and performer. At the origin of the Drapeau Noir quartet (progressive and poetic folk rock) and the electro rock duo Mireille, he performs in groups and solo on various French stages including those of the Bordeaux region where he is from.
Between concerts, composition and writing, Bastien works with Nadia Larina on several creations (Imaginary Girl, Corps de ville, Comme un dimanche, La Zone, Plein Vol of which he is the author).
The FluO company is supported by the DRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine, the Department of the Gironde, the IDDAC, the Summer Scenes of the Department of the Gironde, the Conservatoire de Bordeaux Jacques Tbibaud, the Ménagerie de verre of Paris as part of StudioLab , the National Center of Dance of Pantin, Micadanses within the framework of the specific accompaniment, as well as by the company "The marches of summer" of Jean-Luc Terrade (reception of the stage and distribution). The show "La Zone" was plastically and artistically supported by the aaO collective (Carole Vergne and Hugo Dayot).
Words from choreographer Nadia Larina
Path
I am Nadia Larina, Russian choreographer and dancer, settled in France for ten years.
During my adolescence, I began to get strongly involved in the feminist cause and the defense of human rights through an associative and militant approach. At the same time, I began my choreographic career, at the beginning rather in traditional dance, classical and cabaret. I combined these two universes quite naturally, gradually entering the field of radical contemporary dance.
After a few years of settling in France, and working as a dancer-performer with different French and European choreographers, I co-founded the company FluO in 2015, located in Bordeaux, with the musician Bastien Fréjaville.
Since 2015, I have worked within the company around three choreographic shows: the solo La Zone (2018), the duo Muage (2020) and the trio Every drop of my blood (2022). The deconstruction of the heteronormative formatting of society becomes the junction point between these three creations.
Every Drop Of My Blood (current creation project - creation 2022) is part of the continuation of the Muage duo, by calling on the artistic participation of external people upstream of the creation, through testimonials.
Cross-cutting themes in the artistic process
In my artistic approach, I am on the side of queer art, in the tradition of radical and committed artists (Yvonne Rainer, Alain Buffard, Steven Cohen) who want to make the private public and free themselves from the domination of the art by white, objective and conventional artists, as well as representations of a sexuality exercised in a binary setting.
My writing, which translates the intimacy of the performers on the stage, calls for a radicality of bodies in movement, their extreme commitment, inspired by the aesthetics of exhaustion and performance, dear to Belgian choreographers (Lisbeth Gruwez, Jan Martens , Wim Vandekeybus).
One of the inexhaustible sources of inspiration remains for me my Russian culture and such artists as the filmmaker Andreï Tarkovski, little recognized during his lifetime, the poet, singer and actor Vladimir Vyssotsky, forbidden the time of the Soviet Union, or the Belarusian protest writer Svetlana Alexievich.
Despite my radical and committed dance, I remain very attached to the dreamlike universe of my creations, which lie on a blurred border dear to surrealists, between dream and reality. I could characterize my choreographic and artistic approach as surreal, queer, political, poetic, radical and committed.
Nudity holds an important place in my creations. It is something that came naturally in the current context of overprotection of the body, as a questioning of what is dance, moving bodies, costumes, the codes of representation… The beauty of naked bodies, without artifice , without decoration, dressed in lights, always attracted me. I like the skin, because it is "what is most profound", as Paul Valéry said.
Coming from the cabaret where the nude was the order of the day and where I started working very early (at 15), without really understanding where I was going and how I was using my naked body, helped by artistic directors who abused me Psychologically, I am now striving to go beyond the representation of naked bodies as objects of sexuality and desire. I opt for nudity, unlike nude, always smooth and sexually attractive. I am looking for the realism of the nude, the realism of bodies, such as they are. I am looking for non-gendered, non-binary, deconstructed, de-sexed and decontextualized movement, which eludes our perceptions. But the deexual body is a lure ... So I look for the body of the orifices, "a vibrant flesh, full of desires, nomadic pleasures, enigmas and mysteries" (Roland Huesca in "Plural nudities", NDD, autumn 15, N 64). I try to accept and get my audience to accept “this porous, perforated, orficial skin where the body does not stop”, as Jean Baudrillard said.
Like Yvonne Rainer, Anna Halprin, but also Les Femen, I use my body as a weapon of protest, a space of freedom and protest against a hegemonic, patriarchal and heteronormous world. A world of domination and exploitation.
Like Alain Buffard, Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Bel, Laatifa Laabissi, Mette Ingvartsen, Ayen Parolin, Christine Gérard, Lia Rodrigues, Mélanie Perrier, I deconstruct, I question myself about the body, the spectacle, history, desire, instincts .
While desecrating the naked body and the usual representations of sexuality, by freeing male and female bodies from their images, I let myself be overtaken by the repressed, by the Dionysian, by my desires and my impulses, to "create dissonances, deviations and excess of meaning in the monolithic meanings of the genre ”(Roland Huesca in“ Plural nudities ”, NDD, autumn 15, N 64). Our incomplete bodies are inexhaustible reserves of senses ...
As Gilles Deleuze said, the body is an "unlimited infinity" ... I seek this infinity, this purity, stripped of artifices, through catharsis, the purging of the feelings of spectators, dancers and dancers, performers and performers… "Nudity is beauty, truth is art", - said Isadora Duncan.