Boris Charmatz. Musée de la danse danse de nuit

About

It is night. Tempelhof is surrounded by an expansive sky. Six dancers move about on bare concrete, their fluorescent anoraks illuminated by floodlights. They talk, mutter and scream. Solitary, against each other, whipping each other into a frenzy. Frantic, like their movements, as if the words and sentences – composed from text excerpts by the writer Tim Etchells Boris Charmatz’ own and others – were pursuing or racing ahead of them. Is this new work by the French choreographer Boris Charmatz a political demonstration? Is it a party, a procession, an exorcism or a nocturnal battle? “Dance has a lot to do with sleep. With dreams and the unconscious. In the night,” says Boris Charmatz, “the spirits come out, the things that scare us.” His stages are often cloaked in a Kafkaesque darkness, and on them the bent body is transformed into sculptural glyphs. The eyes see clearly, the mouth speaks the truth – is this why the manic body goes berserk? As in his groundbreaking plays, Levée des conflits (Suspension of Conflicts, 2010) and the movement sculpture manger (eating, 2014), we are shown a snapshot of a community that literally rotates between doubt and rebellion. The spectator witnesses a hybrid, excessive form of language and movement that articulates the crisis. danse de nuit (Night Dance) unfolds like a hastily drafted sketch of a 21st century vigil – an artistic guerrilla commando in the urban
space.

Production: Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne – Boris Charmatz. Co-production: Théâtre National de Bretagne-Rennes, Théâtre de la Ville & Festival d’Automne à Paris, la Bâtie-Festival de Genève, Holland Festival-Amsterdam, Kampnagel-Hamburg, Sadler’s Wells London, Taipei Performing Arts Center, Onassis Cultural Centre – Athens. With the support from the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès within the framework of the new settings programme.

Cast

With: Boris Charmatz, Ashley Chen, Olga Dukhovnaya, Alexis Hedouin, Mani Mungai, Jolie Ngemi, Marlène Saldana

Choreography: Boris Charmatz
Costumes: Jean-Paul Lespagnard
Lighting: Yves Godin
Vocal Training: Dalila Khatir