Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives

Everything in Castélie Yalombo’s choreography is unstable. She is alone on stage, but her body seems to be manipulated from the outside. Her movements are disjointed: suddenly, with her eyes closed in front of a basin of water, she shapes her limbs and movements as if her body is guided by conflicting forces. With this performance, Yalombo creates a choreography of rare power. Starting from the relationship with her own identity – born in Belgium to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father – she undertakes what she defines as her odyssey in the space of a mixed identity. In front of the audience, her body is crossed by various historical references, but they dissolve every time to claim a singularity more complex than fixed categories. She moves in a space surrounded by clay sculptures, whose colours evoke different tones of skin, while the forms bring to mind a body’s matter before it takes shape, before it is enclosed in a distinct identity. She moves between one image and another in a unique, hypnotic fashion until she becomes a clown, the only figure authorized to speak outside the box. After graduating from ISAC and working as an interpreter for Louise Vanneste, Water, l’atterrée des eaux vives marks Yalombo’s first appearance at the festival. It is an ode to ambiguity from a rising voice in Belgian choreography.