Maguy Marin: Time to Act

Starting in 1944 in the wake of the Liberation and continuing into the '60s, 'houses of hope' were established to lend a semblance of continuity to youngsters orpahaned by the war. Nina's Home takes place between September 1944 and January 1946 in an orphanage housed in a chateau outside Paris. At the outset, the country residence is run by Nina who has a core population of French Jewish children whose parents are probably dead. Food is scarce. News of the Concentration Camps hasn't hit yet, but some months later, a contingent of youths arrive form the liberated camps. The children are a disparate, wild, damaged group and conflicts ensue. Nina's challenge is to help them make their first delicate moves toward the future and in the process restore all of them, including herself, to life.

Inspired by Samuel Beckett's work, with its ten clay-coated performers, May B stages deformed bodies that are the antithesis of all the classical and idealized representations of the dancing body. Humanity, at its most fragile and moving, continues its endless journey, persisting against all odds, obsessed by an imminent end of the world.

May B heralded the international breakthrough of Maguy Marin and has been performed worldwide since 1981. It is based on the writings of Samuel Beckett, who unexpectedly gave the then young and unknown French choreographer his blessing to adapt his work. Echoing the existential forlornness of Becketian characters, Marin's 10 dancers roam the stage like lost vagrants; grunting, sighing, comic, pathetic, awkward and tenderly ridiculous at once, they seem to have stumbled with their strange clay streaked faces out of nowhere into the world. Accompanied by music by Franz Schubert and Gavin Bryars and one single line from Beckett's play Endgame: “Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”