Outside the walls: the Paris Opera Ballet at the Chaillot national dance theatre.

To celebrate Merce Cunningham centennial, Chaillot Theatre presents with the Festival d'Automne à Paris (from the 22nd to the 25th Octobre) a program featuring for the very first time the Paris Opera Ballet (Walkaround Time), the Royal Ballet (Cross Currents) and the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (Pond Way). This show is presented in association with the Festival d'Automne à Paris at the occasion of the Merce Cunningham Feature with the Théâtre de la Ville as part of their "Offsite" Program. 

• Thursday 24 October 2019 – 7:45 pm
• Friday 25 October 2019 - 8:30 pm
• Saturday 26 October 2019 – 3:30 pm
• Saturday 26 October 2019 - 8:30 pm

This ballet was premiered by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the 2^nd Festival of the Arts Today (Buffalo, United-States) March, 10^th 1968 and entered the Paris opera Ballet repertoire April, 14^th 2017. The original stage designs for the 1968 production were created and supervised by Jasper Johns. These designs are today part of the Walker Art Center collection.
A replica was made for the stage production at the Paris Opera and managed by Pascal Goblot for the Marcel Duchamp Association. 

Émilie Cozette, Sarah Kora Dayanova, Pauline Verdusen, Victoire Anquetil, Katherine Higgins, Julia Cogan, Lucie Fenwick, Claire Gandolfi, Sophia Parcen, Gwenaëlle Vauthier, Florian Magnenet,Yann Chailloux, Matthieu Botto, Julien Cozette, Samuel Bray, Alexandre Carniato, Jean-Baptiste Chavignier.

With Walaround Time (196), 8Merce Cunningham decided to explore the scenic possibilities offered by the “ready-made” (or Found objects art). Jasper Johns, the artistic director of the company, recreated for this production Marcel Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even also called The Large Glass, an animated panel composed with diverse spread out materials recomposed in an off-centre space. For choreographic purposes, the main features of the panel are painted on several movable, transparent plastic blocks. The dancers move between these cubes. At the end of the show, the cubes are gathered to recompose the panel. The title Walkaround Time is a reference to an I.T habit where programmers used to pace their office, waiting for their giant computer to finish processing. But it’s also a special dedication to Marcel Duchamp. Cunningham said that he “seemed to be extremely peaceful, as if days were slowly passing by. I wanted to see if I could grasp his vision of time”.
Time is an important element in this work. Duchamp described his Large Glass as a “delay made from glass”, a delay referring to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, all waiting to satisfy their erotic desires but unable to do so. Walkaround Time is divided into seven parts, each part lasts about seven minutes. The opening part is based on a series of movements coming from Merce Cunningham’s training technique, which could be seen as a choreographic “ready-made”. “I started with simple, very slow movements, keeping an opening mind, just thinking of movement itself. I wanted a very long, divided into two parts dance. I inserted many allusions to Duchamp and his work but I never explicitly explain it to anyone because it gets too complicated. So is the “ready-made” concept for example. A “ready-made” is an already existing object that is re-used. That’s why this ballet shows recurring elements”.