Body Toy, 2005, performance

 

Foofwa d’Imobilité is an explorer

 

His explorations render Foofwa d’Imobilité’s dancing impossible to classify. Neither totally conceptual nor exclusively physical, it mixes verbal leaps with entrechats, video projections with dissociated limbs, plays on tempo with gestural irony. If a background in the Cunningham technique forms the bedrock of his work, Foofwa also ventures into uncharted territory, taking risks and pushing his body to its uttermost limits. No doubt because of his past – superb training and topnotch stage experience – he has no qualms about flouting, even shaking up, convention : He does so quite unawares.

As eccentric and inventive as Tintin’s Professor Tournesol, Foofwa must nevertheless submit to the relentless discipline of his art. Each creation means starting over again from scratch, parting as much as possible with any stylistic reflexes, and bidding good riddance to old habits. However, making a clean sweep of things does not mean forgetting his technique. On the contrary, Foofwa uses his phenomenal mastery as a faithful tool with which to forge a language of his own, a whole new dance. At the crossroads between reflection on the history of movement and our era, an era of globalization and new technologies, his dancing blends politics with humor. It is serious, brillant, precise and… madly demanding.

Never does he push forward his own person, fiddle with it or make use of it per se. Rather, his work is a manner of technical feat whose psychological and emotional impact depends on how it is received – on the viewer, in whom Foofwa places his trust.

Such a choreographer is humbler than most, but also more extravagant. Brash and bewitching, he has a gift for what he does. The kind of gift that makes it hard to take your eyes off him ».

 

Caroline Couteau