playful performance

In three weeks Steve Paxton re-envisioned his performance Ave Nue together with 10 SNDO (School for New Dance Development) students. A very short period for such a project. So what did it bring us? The starting point of Ave Nue was not the movement, it was the space: a long hallway dissected in parts by pillars. Colourful pillars. Paxton decided that in stead of a gradual green-to-white hallway, which was used in the original piece in Brussels, he wanted the pillars to have the colours of the rainbow. This is the first major difference between Ave Nue 1985 and the re-envisioned Ave Nue 2009.¹

I visited the performance twice, during the dress rehearsal and the premiere. This article reports my experience of the piece by reflecting on both these performance and the rehearsals I visited in the weeks before. My aim is not to compare the two performances I saw, or to compare the 2009 version with the original one. I will try to give an overview of what Ave Nue was and has become.

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