Foofwa, One Man Performing a Whole Century of Dance

Foofwa d’Imobilité will illuminate the stage of ACT Shanghai with his famous piece Histoires Condansées, charting the history of dance with one-man performance/ lecture.

Dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Foofwa started his career as a choreographer in 1998 in New York and founded the Neopost Foofwa Company in Geneva in 2000. Since then he puts his body and mind at the service of creations where the human, the generous, the authentic prevail over aesthetics.

“Histoires Condansées”

The wonderful world of 20th century dance is packed with illustrious names, such as Loïe Fuller, Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Michel Fokine, Mister B., Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch. If this is too much information for you to digest, don’t panic! Help is at hand. This new version, created with the light artist Jonathan O’Hear, subtitled A one-man performance-lecture on a selected history of dance, demonstrates how certain choreographic trends have helped to shape contemporary art. Bursting with anecdotes, which serve as a timely reminder that dance is as old as humanity itself, Foofwa d’Imobilité rumbustiously decodes the myriad forms of dance that have been created over the last 125 years and that are still being used today. He quite literally walks the talk by singing the music himself, describing the costumes and stage design and proving that the history of dance is alive and kicking.

“Dancewalk”

It is an ongoing performance project, and a product of Foofwa d’Imobilité’s desire to stretch our perception of dance’s time and space. Mixing walking and dancing so that it covers several kilometers, it is a geographic inscription of body and dance. It is dance traveling through cities and landscapes, walking becoming dancing, dance phrases metamorphosed into a personal action. It becomes a metaphore of one’s own destiny through life. Since 2017, Foofwa is no longer performing alone, but includes local participants : dancers, non-dancers, musicians, old and young, thus developing a new form of performative mappings and social ties, permeable to the cultural and political environment in which it takes place.