One minute of dance per day: a daily dance gesture, an act of poetic resistance

Flux Laboratory explored the theme of Encounter and Travel by inviting choreographer and researcher Nadia Vadori-Gauthier to share her dance tools on a journey that will cross Geneva, Milan and Athens.

Nadia has performed her dance minutes in each city, her trip has been accompanied by a series of masterclasses in order to encourage meeting, the transmission of knowledge and sharing.

In January 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier decided to initiate an act of poetic resistance, Une minute de danse par jour, in order to respond with sensitivity to this difficult context and not to give in to the fear or the astonishment provoked by the shock of events.

She chose to use her dance-performance tools in everyday spaces, to share them with others and to cross bodies and gazes, driven by the need to create links and make life circulate. She embarked on what she then believed to be instantaneous and fleeting action, not realizing that she was embarking on a long-term adventure woven from current events.

One minute of dance a day is a daily act of poetic resistance, involving dance and video. It engages the body in relation to contexts, circumstances, environments.

Its realization involves dancing every day for a minute in everyday spaces, outdoors or indoors, with those she meets: artists, friends, strangers, shopkeepers, city officials, elderly people, students. Same-day online dances on the Internet and on social networks.

One minute of dance a day also questions the place of dance in different everyday spaces, including urban space. In some dances, the body is incorporated into the materials of the city (street furniture, architecture) or the gestures of those who work there, in order to shift the habits of gaze, to play with the inscription of the body in the space and to see what dance can do, in terms of aesthetic - somatic, poetic - political medium of experience and transformation. Each dance bears witness to a particular day and its succession. Little by little, a series is being developed which, like a newspaper, is part of a historicity weaving both private and public, private and collective elements.

This project constitutes over time a danced testimony of our time.