en vie... en ville

Swiss dance artists DA MOTUS! create a remarkable questioning performance. Their practice takes the form of meticulously choreographing their dramatically costumed bodies into site-specific organic installations, as it were, using a continually innovative, highly gestural, hyperbolic and surreal vocabulary.

This cutting-edge, spectacular visual grammar is scripted into a silent geometrical ballet involving extreme metaphor, fantasy and control.

The supple plasticity and precise drill of the group’s lively style cannot be coded as conventional theatre, dance or body art. The transgressive articulation fissures the categorical, embraces the absurd and relentlessly strips aesthetic norms to reveal an essential message.

A stark blend of the mechanical with the explosively intense, the artists’ critical intervention in public space is a mode of perfected synchrony, apparently directed and energized by a unique outstanding will, seemingly martial and urgent, but finally burlesque and touching. The performance questions about the logic of the alienated relationships human beings create with the urban environment.

"Surprising short-choreographies alternate with impressive statues. A lasting production of "city-equipment", alienating and fascinating at the same time ... A exceptional fusion of art and architecture - a brilliant example of innovative street-theatre, that intervenes in public area and shapes it." (Charlie Bick, directeur artistique Festival tête-à-tête Rastatt, 2006)

"...a silent geometrical ballet ...of high aesthetics ..." (Die Rheinpfalz 30.07.2005)

"The four Swiss impress by perfect synchronization ... they move as guided by a single will." (Badisches Tagblatt 26.05.2006

"On the cobble-stones, poetic bodies ... a performance full of fineness." (L’Express 07.07.2004)

"This kind of urban choreography rises in its challenge when it renews the look we have on the city… Dance here is no longer about the classical art of beautiful movement or a contemporary search of expression. It rather is a critical approach of the urban environment. A calling into questions of our way to look ... Sometimes it takes four yellow characters coming straight out of a zany fantasy to help you open up your eyes and rediscover a fragment of the city…" (La Liberté 25.10.2003)

"A wonderful allegory of urban life, which doesn’t give any ready-made answers but asks the attentive audience intelligent questions." (Esther Sutter, dance-journalist, 2003)