Philippe Decouflé offers a new version of Codex, his first great public success, an already legendary piece, originally conceived for seven dancers. Under the title of Tricodex, this third version produced for the Ballet de l’Opéra national de Lyon multiplies its phantasmagoria by thirty performers.
Tricodex is a vegetable and mineral journey, where bodies are transformed into strange animals and imaginary plants. Microbes, insects spend vegetables… The dancers of the Opéra de Lyon undergo an incredible pallet of metamorphoses. In the beginning was darkness. Infinite smallness. Then movement… towards the cosmos… to the head-spinning movement of the planets. The costumes extend and continue the dancer’s movements to invent new forms. Bodies multiplied and disjointed. A world which seems elsewhere, but which could, after all, be ours.
I came across a strange scientific treatise…I came across different types of microbes, climbing ferns, a few birds and observed the movement of crazy planets. I looked through a telescope, through a microscope and through glasses: I couldn’t believe my eyes!
Philippe Decouflé
For the third time – after Codex in 1986, and Decodex in 1995 -, Decouflé is putting his work back on the job and on the stage: drawing inspiration from a kind an illustrated encyclopedia (drawn at the end of the 1970s by Luigi Seraphini), populated by fantastic animals, imaginary plants and animated vegetables, his show takes us jubilantly into a surreal world, where dancers elastic bands can embody the infinitely small, imperceptible, suggesting the vertiginous cosmos. With lots of DIY, machinery, projections, special effects and spatial challenges, this improbable offspring of the enchanter Méliès plays with reflecting mirrors, to confuse truth and illusion.