(ELLE) RETIENT

In this gesture of recollection, we find ourselves, by a strong mimetic movement that the accuracy and the emotion of Olga de Soto’s tone communicate easily, reweaving some threads of our own past. Confession on the stumbles of the creative act, tribute to the memory, interrogation on the becoming of Man and the trace of art, the performance breaks down the barriers between fields, creates new resonances, opens some doors.

Alice Bourgeois, Les souvenirs d'Olga, Mouvement (FR), Jan 31, 2016

During a number of years Olga went in search of dancers and spectators of one of the most politically engaged works in the History of dance, The Green Table by Kurt Jooss (1932). The journeys undertaken – from Belgium to Chile, from Germany to England, from The Netherlands to France -, the collection of clues, testimonies, archives, if they constitute a remarkable route, they mainly reveal an essential and subjacent material: the encounter, the human being, the individual, their personal history and the way it fits in the collective history, the traces that an existence carries from what it has endured. This crossing - multi-directional and polysemous - condenses in (Elle) Retient to question the experience and the traces in the body of the person who undertook it, in her dance itself, that research had nearly erased. In speech as well, relay of knowledge and vector of emotions. In light and darkness, listening and humility.

Marie Baudet, Œuvres et corps à l'épreuve du temps, La Libre Belgique (BE), Oct 8 2015

Dance is erased from the body, little by little, to become a memory. Then, it is shared in words. A guiding thread is set across the stage, in spiral. It coils as the story unfolds, as if aspirated, while teas and coffees are shared with the people interviewed.

Warming up your body, your muscles, in the creaking of old paths, that have not been follow for a while but that are nonetheless very present by their elegant traces.

Stéphanie Cassilde, (Elle) Retient, Charleroi Danses' Blog

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