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The movement and the sound are improvised but create imagery that is strong and draws on the archetypal: there is no wooliness about it, nothing superfluous. Nadj transforms bit by bit, becoming less human, more crow

Il y a quatre ans, Josef Nadj, artiste associé au Festival, avait offert, en compagnie du plasticien Miquel Barceló, un duo mémorable baptisé Paso Doble, une heure d’art et de travail dans la glaise. Quatre ans plus tard, c’est aussi en duo qu’il revient à Avignon, partageant la scène de la salle Benoît-XII avec son vieux complice, le musicien Akosh Szelevényi, avec qui il a créé un festival de jazz.

les Corbeaux lorgnent vers le ciel et l’apesanteur, ne laissant comme traces au bout des doigts que les taches d’encre coulant de la plume de roseau. Les roseaux, Nadj les choisit lui-même, dans les marécages autour de son village de Kanjiza, en Voïvodine (Serbie), près de la frontière hongroise

Avant de danser, Nadj a peint et dessiné, et n’a jamais cessé. Adepte de la plume et de l’encre de Chine, il a toujours identifié chorégraphie et calligraphie.

Les Corbeaux (The Crows), choreographed by Josef Nadj with music by Akosh S, is an enigmatic piece that draws the audience in through its very quietness and concentration.

Les Corbeaux, the pair’s sixth collaboration, is inspired by the countryside of former Yugoslavia

with his finely tuned body, Nadj is a master of balance and can teeter on the brink of a pose to great effect. I wanted more, but tantalisingly he rations his dance moves for the sake of conceptual purity.

Everything came out of a fortuitous encounter with a Japanese crow. A few years ago, when Josef Nadj was rehearsing a solo on the roof of a theatre in Kyoto, a crow perched not far from him. Out of the glance that the dancer, in full movement, cast on the dark bird, suddenly emerged the idea of a show.

It was the excuse for a return to a childhood in Vojvodina, in ex-Yugoslavia where the crow holds an important place

The animal of wisdom, a disturbing link with mystery, the symbol of the world's unity, the crow holds the key to the cycle of life and death, the real and the dream, the divine and the diabolical. It was also the pretext for a physiological and behavioural study, involving the imitation of a movement, a gait, a flight, a landing, almost a savoir-faire.

Les Corbeaux, which was first performed in Switzerland in 2010