creations
cycles
In his unceasing quest to explore emotions, Éric uses an ever-expanding range of artistic treatments: pure movement, images and films, contemporary music, voice, visual arts installations, stage direction, etc.
He chose to develop his creative work around thematic cycles that he browses through from multiple angles, alternating intimate and scope projects.
After TRACES between 2013 and 2017, the cycle UTOPIES was initiated in 2018.
utopias
UTOPIAS explores our present, past, future, real or imaginary construction and development models, could they be success or failures. Through these utopias and dystopias, the creation works will reflect our (in)ability to (re)invent, (dis)integrate ourselves individually and / or collectively: family, group, society, nation, humankind.
Thus, the international cooperation projects body, voice and percussion TŘESK (2019) and Reaching Out (2022) in partnership with the ensemble N.E.S.E.V.E.N. (Germany) expose our quest for identity; Vers Abraxa (2019) developed for and by students of the University Côte d’Azur confronts them with their own dystopian vision of a real or fantasized future; the solo My Dreamed Life (2020) tackles the subject of personal utopias; the interdisciplinary piece The Dreams Gatherers (2021) invites us to rediscover the sensations of childhood, the taste for words and imagination, in a dreamlike and poetic universe; the staging in movement of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s opera Phaéton (2022) for the Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur takes an uncompromising look at hubris and power, resonating with current events.
The UTOPIAS cycle will end in 2023 with the creation of Benjamin Britten’s participatory opera Noye’s Fludde at the Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, the theme of which resonates strongly with environmental issues, and with the participatory choreographic piece Au nom du rêve, which deals with the experience of physical and psychological confinement that each of us may feel in the course of our lives, and with liberation through dance as a catharsis.
main projects
Au nom du rêve (In The Name of The Dream)
2023 / participative work
The piece In the name of dream was born from the collective awareness that everyone has already, in the face of the events of recent years, experienced a feeling of physical or psychological confinement. It is therefore quite natural that Eric Oberdorff decided to draw form the research work he has been conducting for many years in prisons to imagine this participative creation on the theme of confinement.
In each performing place, a group of participants will reconstitute the piece in a process of perpetual recreation. The physical and mental commitment of the amateur dancers who constitute this special group and the identity of the hosting theatre will nourrish the dramaturgical framework, the movements and the sounds that constitute the backbone of the piece.
L'Arche de Noé (Noye's Fludde)
2023 / participative opera
Tale of survival in the face of a major natural disaster, Noye’s Fludde is a participative opera written and composed by Benjamin Britten. In this new production commissioned by Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur, the story resonates strongly with contemporary environmental issues. It draws on a universal mythological past and is fully relevant to our own times. Metaphorically, it imagines the realization and then the implementation by a collective impulse of a project enabling us to envisage a happy outcome and to build together another future, open and optimistic.
Thanks to the energy, voices and movements of 120 young performers backed by the Orchestre philharmonique de Nice, we'll be staging this tale of initiation through song, dance and music, set against enchanting backdrops digitally designed live by Étienne Guiol and spaces chiselled by Jean-Pierre Michel's lights.
Vox Naturae
2023 / music theater
Following their past collaborations (Seven Stones at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Akhnaten at the Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur), conductor Léo Warynski invites Éric Oberdorff, accompanied by Jean-Pierre Michel for the light design and Camille Pénager for the costumes design, to direct and choreograph the singers of his ensemble Les Métaboles for the creation of the performance Vox Naturae, piece about the work of Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer.
Considered a pioneer of ecology in music, the man to whom we owe the notion of the "soundscape" has never ceased to militate in favor of respect for nature, particularly in its acoustic dimension. Of his vocal music, he says it "seeks to establish a spiritual relationship with the environment", even "to restore aspects of nature that have been neglected or annihilated by mankind".
Believing in magic, making the world vibrate and tuning spirits, this is the experience to which Vox Naturae invites us.
Reaching Out
2022 / musical theater
Best Production Award at Biennale di Venizia / Biennale Musica 2022
In its quest for meaning and identity, man tries tries to communicate with his fellow man, with nature, with the universe, with those who have gone before him and those who have not yet been born. Reaching Out speaks about This quest, this desire to finally reach inner peace, a chimerical wish pursued by men since the dawn of time. The work is composed of four musical pieces of unequal length, each of which, in its own way, approaches the subject from a unique and singular angle.
Composer Ondřej Adámek & Éric Oberdorff research together for several years now on the presence of bodies in movement on stage, searching for a new physicality and authenticity in music and its interpretation. They are looking to open the fields of physical expression palettes by dynamizing staging, movements and vocal expression.
MOVING VOICES is the name they have given to this new trend.
Phaéton
2022 / opera
For this production commissioned by Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur and its director Bertrand Rossi, Éric is collaborating for the first time with the music director Jérôme Correas, from the ensemble Les Paladins, a fine connoisseur of 17th century music.
If Lully made Phaéton a parable on power and an ode to his master the Sun King, Éric gives life to an interdisciplinary piece mixing opera, dance and circus full of vitality and resonance that could touch the audience, both informed and uninitiated. Phaéton is above all a tale bringing together all the ingredients of the human comedy such as a young ambitious man ready to do anything in his quest for glory, a mother blinded by maternal love, a young abandoned passionate lover, a powerful man but an absent father, a ruling caste concerned with its privileges, a shattering plea to prevent the destruction of the Earth and Nature... Definitely a contemporary tragedy!
Les glaneurs de rêves (The Dreams Gatherers)
2021 / choreographic piece
With Les glaneurs de rêves (The Dreams Gatherers), Éric Oberdorff is inspired by the eponymous short and luminous autobiographical story by Patti Smith, a short prose text inviting us to rediscover the taste of dreams, the imagination and the sensations of childhood. Bodies in movement, their raw states, the cross-fertilization of the musical universe born from the fusion of rock and baroque music, projection of filmed images, chiseled dramaturgy, finely tuned light, performers curious to push their limits are the ingredients which enable to transmit to the audience the poetic power contained in the text: “... I was drawn from the laughter of the other children into a stillness I aspired to master. Here one could hear a seed form or the soul fold like a handkerchief…”
Filled with poetry, The Dreams Gatheres remind us that it is more urgent than ever to dream, individually or collectively. Artistic creation gives us all this part of escape we need to develop our minds, giving us the chance to discover different worlds under the watchful eye of the creator, freeing our imagination and shifting our perspective, allowing us to free ourselves, if only for a few hours, from the clutches of everyday life.
Vers Abraxa (Towards Abraxa)
2019 / interdisciplinary project
The Art and Design Schools Commision of the Université Côte d'Azur (UCA) commissioned Éric Oberdorff and Compagnie Humaine to imagine and lead a project designed to create working bridges and resources and knowledge pool between students and teaching teams.
Based on Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Eric conceived the Vers Abraxa project, bringing together 65 art and design students over the course of a year for a series of creative laboratories exploring the utopian and dystopian models students dream of or dread. Their task was to imagine, create and assemble, together, the artistic material needed to construct for the public a journey ranging from installation to stage performance, in order to provide some answers to the question posed above: what kind of future world does each student dream of? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick).
Bal(l)ade poétique (Poetic Ballad)
2018 / ambulatory work
Since 2018, Éric Oberdorff has been creating and offering poetic wanderings, tailor-made artistic journeys to discover alternative spaces, whether urban or rural, gardens, museums, wasteland, parks, forests, monuments or other places of heritage.
Taking up Icelandic poet Sjón's statement, "I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!", the choreographer and the artists invite the audience to a discovery walk during which, in small groups, the spectators meet, at the bend of the path, dancers, actors, musicians, circus performers, who each, in suspended time, distills poems, odes to the day, to the night, to nature and to life.
Checkpoint
2018 / choreographic piece
[CHECKPOINT = getaway // place of input and/or output // meeting place // friction place // control point // starting point for a possible future // in an unavoidable emergency atmosphere]
First piece of the creation cycle UTOPIES, checkpoint is a Euro-Mediteranean project built during a two year creation residences series in Morocco in partnership with Institut français of Agadir.
A percussionist, a singer and three dancers invite a part of the audience to a collective celebration on stage, then the performers start their travels. The pace, the rushes, the dancer’s falls crash with the voice and the percussions in a murged writing which makes us experience a journey in which each run, each rhythm acts as a barometer of emotions.
[Walk or die. Walk and die. Fall. Raise again. Hope. Exist or disappear. Must dream, only alternative to nothingness.]
traces
cycle 2013-2017
TRACES is the name and central theme of the four-season cycle of creations, exploring traces, memories and their impact on our identity and our lives.
The feature film Consolation, with its ten characters exposing their existential doubts and thirst for the absolute, the choreographic piece Monde imagination and the iconographic projects Corpus Fugit and Sur ma peau probing the world of prisons, and the dance-theatre solo Tsunemasa on the quest for self-acceptance are all works traversing this theme. The cycle ended in 2017 with Mon corps palimpseste, a work about memories of the body and spaces.
main projects
Mon corps palimpseste (My Body Palimpsest)
2017 / trio
A palimpsest, in Greek palímpsêstos ("scratched out again"), is originally a piece of parchment that has already been used, and whose inscriptions have been scratched out so that it can be written on again. So it is a forgotten memory, written on the skin in successive layers, bearing traces of previous stories. Mon corps palimpseste is Éric Oberdorff's last creation in his TRACES cycle. He explores the traces that people leave on their own bodies, on the bodies of people they meet, and on the places they pass through. The de-formations caused by experience. The movements that are written on bodies, then disappear, replaced over time by other gestures, other choreographies, memorial inscriptions between consciousness and unconsciousness. This memory, woven into every fibre of our being, is symbolized by thin strips of multicoloured fabric that hinder or connect, bury or imprison, like a spider-like structure imagined by visual artist Aurélie Mathigot; and by the haunting music, all electric guitar slides, imagined by Anthony Rouchier.
A kind of retrospective of an inner journey, Mon Corps Palimpseste catches moments of lightning speed on the fly, the better to scrutinize them.
Sur ma peau (On My Skin)
2017 / film & photographies
Sur ma peau is a photographs and video dance project made in prison. It is part of a choreographic and plastic arts workshops conducted with female inmates in the Prison of Nice. The film and the photographs constitute the memory of the research process engaged with the prisoners to nourish the inside / outside dialogue. Éric wished to go with the prisoners in an artistic research to take an inventory on their bodies, by using the movements created during the workshops, by exploring their tattoos and scars as special elements carrying memories of their identities and witnessing of their life paths.
The film has been several times awarded and was screened in multiple festivals around the world.
Consolation
2013 / film feature long
Feature film written, choreographed, filmed, edited & directed by Eric Oberdorff, Consolation screens a moment of the lives of 10 men and women of different ages, cultures, social status, religion, life paths. Each of them in his/her everyday life, they tell us about their relationship to the world, to the other, to love, to creation, to loneliness, to life, to death, to nature, to God or to the lack of Gods... They confide their memories, their emotions, their doubts, their quest for identity, relying on texts excerpted from Our need for consolation is insatiable by Swedish author Stig Dagerman and from the poem Fiançailles by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Dance is also used in the narrative setting in metaphorical and dream sequences, like poetic suspensions of time.