‘I saw 360 and PAO, and everytime, it terribly moved me’, Delphine says, with tears in her eyes, at the end of the performance. ‘There is such a bond between them…’.
There was a peaceful silence indeed on the Town Hall square this Sunday 20 June. For forty five minutes, we were suspended, alert, tense…carried away by the two acrobats. Claire Cordelette-Lourdelle and Nicolas Lourdelle took us through their story without a word. The story of two people, two loneliness looking for each other, running away from each other, finding, loving, playing with each other, losing one another…
She is on the rope, he is on the Chinese pole, they avoid, challenge and meet each other on the ground or through acrobatics. The stage, like a boxing ring, is a perfect place for their state of body and physical feat.
As if they were in a match, they sit down in between rounds, to recover. The performance title, ‘PAO’, actually refers to the world of fighting, as it is the name of the cushion used by boxers for training purposes.
Directed by Sébastien Lalanne, the duet is indeed a mix of violence, poetry, animality and tenderness… ‘We had directed 360 ourselves’, Claire Cordelette-Lourdelle notes. ’But Sébastien really understood what we wanted to show here. We wanted to keep that love relationship without falling into ‘naive romantism’. Showing the frailty and the emotion we feel while on apparatus.’ Each gesture is the reflection of a state of mind, nothing is left randomly. Even the music, played by guitarist Céline Challet on stage, perfectly accompanies the artists.
Claire Cordelette–Lourdelle is very pleased : ‘It went really well! We had a good audience, very alert. And it is the company’s ’trademark’ in a way: we perform in a very intimate way, hence the particular attention required from the public. Especially because we perform in street-theatre festivals where burlesque is often prominent. We are often surprised by that, but this attention we get supports us and enables the show to mature’…