“A new page is turning for the company XY, as with each project. More stripped down, very choreographic, this creation offers their acrobatic language new and generous escapes, under the impulse of Rachid Ouramdane who takes care of both the surges and the collapses.

There is a form of urgency in the exhibition scene that opens Möbius: to cross the stage en masse, to play with speed to meet the other, to carry him high, to make him slide on the ground… Like free electrons, the 19 acrobats draw in their races an invisible gearing that no clash will come to alter. And in a few minutes, it is all the art of XY which explodes and still stuns by its virtuosity, its art of the acrobatic carry and the gliding, and its collective dash. The choreographer Rachid Ouramdane has found in their material an ideal ground to pursue his research on large ensembles and displacements. The image of the swarms of starlings works like a charm in this creation. As the heir of Odile Duboc, whose dancer he was, he digs into the notion of inter-space so dear to the first choreographer of Vols d’oiseaux (1981), taken up again in his previous Murmuration created in 2017 with the Ballet de Lorraine. This time, the collaboration with XY allows her to open a new space, that of the air. A third dimension is then offered, in a combination of magnificently complex trajectories consisting of knotting and untying the clouds that arise and then disappear. But more than that, the show allows us to consider acrobatics under the angle of a poetized deconstruction.

Nathalie Yokel