A revitalising staging of the generation of lost souls intensely choreographed with deep bass music, blinding darkness and lights, and pulsating ecstatic movements.
“Dead trees give no shelter” offers the audience an ambient chaos of darkness and vibrations profoundly stabbing the bloodless mind through a not-so-usual trajectory of choreographing theatrical dance coalesced with creative music and lighting elements. According to Florentin Ginot, a multi-talented bassist and the mastermind of this theatrical work of art, this piece is perhaps best imagined in visual terms through surface, pigments, coarseness and roughness, oxidation and fusion.1 He has collaborated with Helge Sten, a Norwegian electro musician and producer, for the confounding musical beats and vibrations, and with Soa Ratsifandrihana, a Franco-Madagascan dancer and choreographer, for the interpretation and choreography. These three artists fused their creative talents together fabricating an authentic experience to present a highly expressive loss of hope that a regular theatre-goer does not normally encounter.
The audience is welcomed with complete and absolute darkness along with several indiscernible electric vibrations extremely penetrating the soul and making all the spirits gyrate in all directions. An enormous vertical structure centric to a steady tableau is then gradually presented. The central figure eventually erodes and forms an exhausted landscape. The overspread darkness is cautiously diminished presenting a post-war soul sweeping the floor. Some poetic texts appear, then an eerie sound is made visible to the senses in conjunction with universal darkness. One can say that doomsday has happened. Heartstopping sound then pumps everyone’s beingness and existence ready to explode in small fragments scattered around space. An illumination from above then presents a little soul being slowly carried down to the ground. A strong light appears and illuminates another lost soul, which then deliberately penetrates through the blinding light by producing quivering movements to escape from the other world. The soul successfully traverses through the other side of darkness and learns to survive through endless determination, perseverance, and hard work. The lost soul meets two other fragile souls in the central vertical structure. They learn to flicker in complete ecstasy and harmony against a fragmented environment that represents survival and adaptation to a whole new world. Illumination in complete darkness and deep virile bass music conjugated with cavort movements produce an artistic theatrical piece.
Overall, this piece has offered a whole new level of experience by presenting a symbiotic degree of interpretation through pulsating and stabbing music and choreography that rattle through the bones into ashes. It is bewildering in the sense that evokes the mind with several questions and confusion.
