MEDIATHEK

1) "À bras-le-corps"

RECORDING DATE: 21.10.1995

RUNNING TIME: 47 min. 

The beginning…

We wanted to perform far from the normal context of a performance, with the rows of seats and the stage, and also far from our student days. We wanted to install in a closed space a large square of chairs strictly delimiting our movement, abolishing by the same gesture all distance between the audience and ourselves, abolishing any possibility of an escape by one or the other. Everything had to lend itself to our approach: a choreography composed from a sensation of fatigue, a mass crawling with difficulty to a cruel death, restarting again without cease, provisional. Heat and falling mingled, to make death in the same way one plays on words: from the tip of the lips.

… continué

But, with time, À bras-le-corps has gotten rid of all its poetical and theoretical arsenal; it remains, at the very most, a few notes of intentions, archived press clippings and photographs – and both of us have frontally attacked a lot of other work – "exploits" rather than "labors". After the dust has settled, our energy appears marked by the desire for power and mass, but also by a lively and joyful irony, the choreography giving precedence to a simple and explosive experience.

À bras-le-corps, as a first work, held staggering and renewed promise for us. The strict framework adapts itself to our evolution/maturation, and the piece increasingly resembles the concept of clearing the fields: bringing to it our experiences as performers and as men, taking from it the emotive fluxes that the structure of the duet welcomes like the spillway of a dam. By its nature, the project has been able to adapt to every environment, from a Dominican convent to a village assembly hall, from a gymnasium to a prestigious or banal proscenium – and to strike against every surface: wood floors, rough concrete, slabs of stone, black or white linoleum, and even simple countryside earth. The past of this continuing beginning has for us something of an epic....

CHOREOGRAPHY: Dimitri Chamblas and Boris Charmatz

INTERPRÉTATION: Dimitri Chamblas, Boris Charmatz

LIGHT: Renaud Lapperousaz

LIGHT TECHNICIAN: Madjid Hakimi (or Yves Godin)

MUSIC: Paganini Caprici n°1, 10 and 16; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Emi Classics CDC 7 471 71 2

2) "Les Disparates" (stage production) 

DATE: 1994 

LENGTH: 29 min.

Two-headed solo

Joyful and nostalgic, this work for a dancer and Toni Grand’s sculpture evokes fragmenting «states of dancing». Brought forth without transition are the performer’s conflicting desires and (tugging) physical intentions.

What we need is dead silence and lighting activated by a simple switch. A man alone next to a heavy, immobile structure; magnificent harmonies, powerful chords mixed together striking here and there; and three costumes.

There will be a lot of very personal, highly complex, rich, mad, and utterly incommunicable gestures, without too much concern about transitions.

We would also need to put our little performative story in the context of the fundamental notions in the history of modern dance, which would be done in three parts.

• The first part would be exacerbation, pathos, engagement.
• The second part—abstraction, distancing, mastery, relief.
• The third would be introduction to joy, infatuation, the memory of Parisian parties.

(The idea is that these three aspects would allow one to go through all the variants of the “state of dance.” Starting from the bile, touching on the cerebellum and going back to the heart, reaching out to the universal just by extending our fingers from the stage.)

We would need to let the ghosts return for a moment, think of the dead, dedicate this odd mix to those who are departing. This would be very serious and very spirited.

When we were working on Les Disparates, we were thinking of interesting collaborations between visual artists and choreographers such as Factory (which put Hervé Robbe and his performers together with Richard Deacon) and Projet de la Matière (produced by Odile Duboc with Marie-Josée Pillet).

Les Disparates is not a collaboration with Toni Grand, but a chosen work by the artist so that it can be brought as such to the stage. We were looking for an immobile counterpoint to our activity: this sculpture represents for us a non-spectacular aesthetic object that is closed in on itself, inarticulate, a priori resistant to manipulation and displacement, heavy, even though its 700 kilos are hardly perceptible!

Rather than inventing a dance-function for this physical presence, we settled on a dual regime of presence: the presence of a dancing, changing, and visibly aging body, in a constant turmoil of disparate performative choices, and the presence of an object that ignores the attention paid to its own conditions of production even though it offers a way of overcoming that attention.

Boris Charmatz et Dimitri Chamblas

CHOREOGRAPHY: Boris Charmatz & Dimitri Chamblas

INTERPRÉTATION: Boris Charmatz

SCULPTURE: Toni Grand

LIGHTS: Yves Godin

COSTUMES: Dominique Fabrègue

SOUND MATERIAL: sound elements created by Jean-Jacques Benally

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