Time in Reverence

Some performances mine lived experience and summon true presence. Cent Temps is one of them. Marie-Caroline Hominal invites eight residents from care homes to dwell in time rather than keep count of it. From the outset, time stretches and unfurls. Every quiver, every tremor, every held pause carries the gravitas of an event. The choreography leans into the memory etched within these bodies, to their distinct ways of moving, to the singular charge each performer brings to the floor.

The piece is no meditation on life’s final curtain; it is a celebration of movement’s unbroken flow, beyond the bounds of what is usually expected. It opens with a bow. This gesture of greeting and farewell, so often saved for the end of a performance, becomes here the backbone of the work. A mistress of ceremonies heralds each entrance and solo to a playlist that weaves together Mozart, Arvo Pärt and Elvis Presley. These distant refrains from youth also summon the body’s own archive: those traces the years have laid down in posture and in gaze.

With Marie-Caroline Hominal, we have come to recognise a flair for the baroque, for slippery identities, for that tantalising brush between tragedy and comedy, so evident in Froufrou, Hominal/Öhrn and Sugar Dance. It is perhaps most striking in her solo Voice Over, where she welcomed the audience by playfully modulating a cascade of “hellos”. Fifteen years later, she carefully orchestrates the bows of elders, some accompanied by their rollators and carers.

With Cent Temps, a stripping-back takes place. Masks fall away; the tragicomic clash gives ground to a tender spareness in which vulnerability becomes strength. The Franco-Swiss artist, trained, notably, at the Rambert School in London, retains her probing of presence and artifice, yet pares down the signs. Set and sound—voice-over, montage—are held in an economy that allows the spotlight to rest fully on the performers.

This is not a piece about old age; it is a piece with it, and the distinction is immense. Where Kontakthof by Pina Bausch laid bare the emotional residue of past loves in the ageing bodies of former dancers, Cent Temps ventures further into a fragile radicalism: it places before us the unvarnished present of amateur performers. We are not invited to contemplate what a body once was, but what it is, now, within the dense grain of its own time. The dance does not strive to fend off ageing; it reveals and honours it. Gestures become living archives, a dialogue between past and present.

One striking example is this off-kilter reimagining of the seated dance so familiar in care homes. Watch how the movements are chiselled into synchrony: the gesture of sifting passing time, finger by finger, each one unfurling. Then two arms are cast out into space. A gesture of resilience as much as a plea for support. At last, the arms fold back across the chest, composing a kind of self-portrait: at once serene and faintly funereal.

In a society that renders great age invisible, this creation feels like an act of quiet resistance. The performers chase no breakneck tempo; instead, they devise their own measure, scored in pauses, exchanged glances, presences that shine precisely through their limits. An established figure on the Swiss and European scene, and recipient of the Prix de la danseuse exceptionnelle at the 2019 Swiss Dance Awards, the multidisciplinary artist continues to probe the place of the performer and the artifice of the theatrical frame.

Here, the guiding principle is encounter: to compose with lived stories, to make fragility the very heartbeat of the work. A single hand raised, a gaze gently alighting, a bow that both closes and opens the circle of exchange. Cent Temps whispers of another possibility: an elastic, inhabited time in which every gesture holds an entire lifetime. Against forgetting, against erasure.

Bertrand Tappolet