(Paris) “I really like chaos, messiness, and I also have a very strong relationship with memory and the past,” confides to AFP the French choreographer Boris Charmatz, “accomplice” guest of the next Festival d Avignon during which he will experience a giant dance in circles.
At the head of the Tanztheater Pina Bausch in Wuppertal, Germany, for almost two years, he is expected for this 78e edition, from June 29 to July 21 in Avignon, of one of the largest theater and live performance events in the world, organized in the south-east of France.
He will unveil no less than three projects and will be present from the first to the last day. First there will be this unidentified dancing object, Circlesan XXL open-air workshop for the transmission of dances in circles with 200 professionals and amateurs, intended to become a “future piece”.
“One of the most archaic”, but also “modern, forms of dancing is to stand together in a circle”, explains the artist, whose projects like to “question the notion of assembly: how does Shall we get together? How do we debate? “.
For him, “in this moment of great anxiety – war, climatic, economic, social anxiety – we need to create energy together”.
Boris Charmatz will also present Cathedral Libertyfirst creation carried out jointly with the Tanztheater and dancers from its French association Groundcurrently at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in central Paris, until April 18.
This show – previously performed in a church or a factory – will this time be danced in the open air, on the grass of a football field. Acoustics, lighting, spectator seating, everything will be “rethought,” he says.
“Ghosts”
“I like my shows to migrate”, explains the man who professes to invest “public space”, to “be in the landscapes”, whether in Avignon or within “landscapes marked by coal, steel, textiles, crises”.
Having attended the Paris Opera dance school, then the Lyon Conservatory, Boris Charmatz made his debut with the dancer and choreographer Régine Chopinot, a historic figure in New French dance of the 1980s.
He who, among others, was an interpreter for the Belgian dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a major figure in contemporary dance, is now 51 years old. Exactly the same age as the Tanztheater troupe, “which rotates”, but always includes around thirty dancers.
His style ? “I really like chaos, messiness, improvisation, but I like it to be linked to history, memory, the past,” he describes.
“When I started dancing, people told me: ‘If you dance for others, you’re not going to do your own work.’ On the contrary, it is in dialogue with other writings that I was able to invent my own way,” he explains. “I understood that past sensations, ghosts, could be real play partners for inventing.”
Foreverthe third of his projects proposed in Avignon, is also intended to be a seven-hour immersion in Café Müller (1978), cult ballet by German choreographer Pina Bausch, where, in a disorder of chairs and tables, bodies “search for each other, find themselves and do not find themselves”.
No ghosts this time: some of Pina Bausch’s legendary dancers (temporarily no longer retired) will be invited to the set, such as Nazareth Panadero, Helena Pikon, or Jean-Laurent Sasportes.