Nîmes: “Flamenco was love at first sight, a mystical revelation” confides the artist Chloé Brûlé

You were born in Montreal, how did you discover flamenco?

By chance ! I studied classical dance in Montreal, at the school of the Grands Ballets Canadiens. While touring the United States with a small troupe, a dancer was asked to do a flamenco number. At that moment I decided to come to Spain to study and get closer to this language. It was love at first sight, an almost mystical revelation. It was something to do with how the body posed in space. The relationship to rhythm, the gravity of the body which moved with fluidity and heaviness at the same time, the richness of this language. It was fascinating to me.

When you grew up far from this culture, is it difficult to integrate this world to become a flamenco dancer?

It requires plunging into it without any brakes, going all out. You have to let yourself be pierced by all that. It’s a culture, it has to do with the way of life we ​​have here, in Spain, especially in the South. To understand this language, you have to live it, experience it. Coming from the classic, I went from one extreme to the other. I must have forgotten what I knew. After a few years, once I assimilated the flamenco language, poco a pocoI let out what I had in me to find a way to be me, through my pre-flamenca and flamenco experience.

You danced with Israel Galván. What did you learn from him?

Israel is genius, he is someone who teaches us through his art. He’s a great guy, I’m lucky to know him and to be able to spend time with him in a personal way. His art surpasses everything. He has the whole tradition of flamenco in him and he broke all the shackles to go elsewhere. It embodies something artistically very exquisite.

For Los Cuerpos Celestesyou worked on a new form of choreographic writing…

This show was born from the desire that we had, with Marco Vargas, to work with other dancers. Since our beginnings, we have collaborated with singers, musicians, poets… We share the stage with a dancer, a dancer and a musician who is physically present. This new format forced us to change our method. We allowed ourselves to go into the studio with no preconceived ideas, to let the bodies do the talking. The work was done in a very choral way, in constant dialogue with the other and with other languages, because Miguel Marín, the musician comes from electro.

Do you mix universes and present several personalities?

It’s important, we wanted to work in a space without hierarchy. Flamenco is very individualistic. We wanted a more horizontal space, where each of us could radiate and at the same time, sublimate the other. We worked with the uniqueness of each and keeping our personality, highlighting it.

It is also about stars, the universe. Is it a source of inspiration?

This was a discovery during creation. Once we had the pieces a little ordered, we entered a technical residency in a theater in Seville. This is where it became obvious to us, we wanted to suggest that the spectators transform the show into an astronomical observatory. We took our imagination into cosmic space with a very simple, but suggestive staging to create a paradoxical Milky Way where celestial bodies can move…