Hakanaï

Building virtual spaces around dancers has been particularly trendy lately (and certainly effective). Here's another example from the company Adrien M / Claire B (the same as Pixel: Adrien Mondot, multidisciplinary artist, programmer; Claire Bardainne, artist, set designer, and designer).

Hakanaï is a choreographic performance for a dancer in a volume of moving images. In Japanese, Hakanaï defines what is non-permanent, fragile, ephemeral, transitory, somewhere between dream and reality. An ancient word that evokes an elusive material associated with the human condition and its uncertainty, but also with nature. It is written by combining two ideograms, one for man and one for dream. A symbolic connection that is the starting point of this score for a dancer who encounters images, giving life to a space on the margins of the imaginary and the real. The images are animated live, according to physical patterns of movement, to the rhythm of a sound creation also performed live. After the performance, it remains an installation open to spectators.

In Japanese, the word ‘hakanaï’ is used to define the ephemeral, the fragile. The French group, Company Adrien M/Claire B invites the public to join them in the illusory world of dreams. The audience is invited to peer into a cloth cube where a visual haiku of a dancer and thousands of dancing images is unfolding. Hakanaï is an impressive convergence of dance and visual art, of bodies and moving graphics, of reality and dreams.

Since 2004, Company Adrien M/Claire B has been connecting digital culture with the performing arts. The collective develops performances and exhibitions that combine the real with the virtual. By focussing on man and body within a technological framework, they create timeless, poetic works.

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