Transports Exceptionnels

Whoever said excavators can’t dance had clearly never seen TRANSPORTS EXCEPTIONNELS. Created by choreographer Dominique Boivin, it has become one of the most widely seen dance works and a genuine modern classic. Human meets machine, small meets large, fragile meets overpowering. Münchhausen rode a cannonball; Boivin invented a dance with a monster from the construction site.

As a dancer in evening dress transforms the excavator bucket into the circus apparatus of his imagination, Maria Callas soars through arias by Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Bellini. The steel monster rotates, the hydraulics of its arm send it constantly rising and falling, and at times the machine rears like a horse. But who is playing with whom? Who is fooling whom? This David-and-Goliath duo develops an industrial poetry of wildness, elegance and silent understanding between two such unequal partners. Does the mighty bucket not also offer a place of calm? Does it not seem almost caring as its mighty arm hovers protectively over the dancer?

For two decades, Compagnie Beau Geste has toured TRANSPORTS EXCEPTIONNELS around the world – in public squares, on beaches and on every continent. In French, the title refers not only to oversized transport vehicles but also to extraordinary emotional experiences. Perhaps that is one reason for the work’s enduring success: it shows us that, despite all modernity and industrialisation, people will always find ways to reclaim poetry and emotion.