Bonjour India celebrates the International Day of Dance

Bonjour India , the cultural, artistic, educational and literary festival of France in India, celebrated the International Day of Dance through various projects running from March-May 2022. These includes dance performance by  S. Thala and ELEKTRIK, as well as the short film festival Let’s Dance! Let’s Dance and ELEKTRIK is scheduled close to the International Day of Dance - 29th April - a day that highlights the diversity and talent of dancers from all over the globe. Let’s Dance! – already has and will continue showcasing breathtaking dance styles. And soon, Bonjour India’s ELEKTRIK – by Blanca Li will treat audiences to never-before-seen dance moves. S. Thala was recently performed in four Indian cities: Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune, and New Delhi, delighting all who attended.

At the Let’s dance screenings, audiences can watch handpicked shorts by the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. These short films about dance offer astonishing points of view that are personal, dramatic, funny, sometimes nervous, and even explosive. This retrospective provides audiences with an eclectic panorama of all dance styles and their origins. Let’s Dance! has already been screened in Kolkata and in Ahmedabad. It will be screened in Pune on April 28th, Chandigarh on April 28th and 29th as well as in New Delhi on April 29th on the International Day of Dance. The overlap of the showcase with the International Day of Dance gives people an opportunity to celebrate the spirit of dance.

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In the Parisian dance scene, Blanca Li reigns supreme with her cutting edge productions. The latest of these is Le Bal de Paris - an interactive and immersive experience created by Blanca Li herself which allows spectators to actively become a part of the performance through virtual reality, dance, and music! The show starts with a performance by professional dancers in the real world and slowly transitions into a spectacular thirty-five-minute immersion in a fantastic and poetic universe of augmented reality. The audience is no longer a passive observer – each spectator becomes a part of the performance. They can choose an avatar, don a virtual costume designed by Chanel, and interact live with the dancers. The transition from the real to the virtual happens across three ballroom scenes wherein the whirlwind narrative of a romance propels the participants through the performance. The main characters are Blanca Li’s professional dancers but the audience is seamlessly integrated into the story. Everyone is free to dance, enjoy the party as they wish, and interact with whoever they choose to do so. The performance has taken over the dance world by storm and is currently running to packed audiences across Europe.

Bonjour India will have the distinct pleasure of hosting ELEKTRIK by Blanca Li - an incredible electro-dance performance which rewrites the rules of the genre itself! Like Le Bal de Paris, ELEKTRIK too has been choreographed by Blanca Li who is widely recognized as a master of urban dance and recently became the first woman choreographer to join the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 2021. ELEKTRIK features 8 dancers who have won innumerable awards around the world and are recognised internationally for their contribution to electro culture. The soundtrack of the show incorporates a hint of baroque music and has been composed in part by Tao Gutierrez. ELEKTRIK represents a formidable concentration of talent in a cheerful and fun show that can be enjoyed with the whole family and which promises to be the event of the cultural season! As a dance form, electro was invented in the suburbs of Paris in the 2000s. The unique dance style has continuously evolved since then to become synonymous with explosive but precise movements. ELEKTRIK is the third exploration of the electro urban dancing style by Blanca Li after the show Elektro Kif (2009) and the film Elektro Mathématrix (2015). The dance performance is scheduled in Mumbai and Hyderabad on May 8th and 11th respectively. Two shows will also be organized in New Delhi on May 14th and 15th. The event has been organized in partnership with the JSW Group.

Another interesting performance - S. Thala - has been inspired by Marguerite Duras’ novel – L’Amour. The novel tells the story of a man who arrives at a seaside town to abandon his present. Yet there he is reintroduced to his past after meeting a woman to whom he had been engaged twenty years ago as a young man. The woman walks with and is kept watch over by another man. The dance performance captures the interplay between the three through a poetic dance. While Marguerite Duras never visited India, S. Thala_,_ performed by Annette Leday who has studied Kathakali and western dance, accurately captures India as she imagined it. Audience members who had never read L’Amour came away from the performance feeling that they knew Duras intimately.

Speaking about Bonjour India’s three dance events, Mr Stéphane Amalir, Director of the Alliance Française of Delhi, said “Dance, like music, is an international tool of communication that breaks down the barriers that languages erect. Each of these events are not only a great showcase of skill and cooperation between artists, but they also exemplify how dance brings peoples and cultures, and performers and audience, closer together. What could be more valuable in our divided world?”

Bonjour India’s events are open to all and often located in public places to maximize accessibility. The initiative celebrates the partnership between India and France by providing easy access to French and Indian cultural motifs. Bonjour India’s events are meant to entertain audiences of all ages and backgrounds and to lead to lively and friendly discussions.

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