Production Ballet national de Marseille – direction (LA)HORDE, Coproduction Théâtre de la Ville-Paris (France) – ROOMMATES
Duration: 90 min (with intermission).
This new work is a scene in which the dancers embody self-love. They play with amorous narcissism, deconstruct amorous forms, celebrate the freedom of loving, of loving yourself, of enjoying, of existing, of being deprived, of wearing yourself out looking, consuming, struggling to exist. Allowing a metaphysical cycle to appear, referring to a solitary, consumed and consumable love in an accumulation of propositions and renunciations. Pouring out of this victory lap is infinite, volatile, unstable, heightened and absolutely free desire. The audience can therefore ask themselves: is it about loving all those that we are or about examining the relentless loneliness experienced when other people are around?
We’ve devised this programme in order to tell a story with others that reflects who we are and to celebrate the many different kinds of writing by choreographers who have helped shape our gaze, who gave us our first emotions and who are still alongside us today. We feel it’s more important than ever to pay homage to them now with this project.
By bringing such diverse works together, our intention is to challenge the notion of archives and heritage. Each of the choreographers explores the way in which pieces are appropriated or re-appropriated, regardless of whether they are in their own repertoire. Why is this repertoire being revived and updated?
Concept: (LA)HORDE
Choreographies: Lucinda Childs, Peeping Tom, Claude Brumachon & Benjamin Lamarche, Cecilia Bengolea & François Chaignaud, (LA)HORDE – Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, Arthur Harel with the Ballet National de Marseille
Production: Ballet National de Marseille – direction (LA)HORDE; co-production: Théâtre de la Ville-Paris; Supported by the DRAC Paca, the Ministry of Culture, the City of Marseille and the Fundation BNP-PARIBAS.
Photo: Karl Felix; Blandine Soulage; Thierry Hauswald; Pierre Girardin; Boris Camaca – DA Alice Gavin; Didier Olivre; Jesse Willems; Lucie Jansch
DANSER PARCE QU’ON NE PEUT PAS PARLER AUX ANIMAUX
GRIME BALLET
Duration: 12 min.
For this programme, François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea have drawn on the choreographic material they used in their collaboration Altered Natives’ Say Yes to Another Excess – TWERK and the solo Stitches devised by Cecilia Bengolea to come up with a novel hybrid piece lasting around 10 minutes for four dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille.
The solo Stitches, created by Cecilia Bengolea for the Japanese dancer Erika Miyauchi, is a minimalist performance that mixes ballet and dancehall. In Altered Natives’ Say Yes To Another Excess – TWERK, created in 2012, François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea invented a singular and physical writing that plays on sexual identities, inspired by their practical and anthropological experience of club dances (including Jamaican dancehall, krump, house, and split & jump).
This way of working and playing with writing will be combined with the power and intensity of the musical repertoire found in grime, the electronic music genre that emerged in east London in the early 2000s, and which links together, blends and transforms the sounds of dancehall, hip hop and UK garage.
Choreography: Cecilia Bengolea & François Chaignaud
Assistant choreographer: Erika Miyauchi
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
Music: Stitches, Label Butterz, UK
WEATHER IS SWEET
(LA)HORDE
Duration: 10 min.
This new work is a scene in which the dancers embody self-love. They play with amorous narcissism, deconstruct amorous forms, celebrate the freedom of loving, of loving yourself, of enjoying, of existing, of being deprived, of wearing yourself out looking, consuming, struggling to exist. Allowing a metaphysical cycle to appear, referring to a solitary, consumed and consumable love in an accumulation of propositions and renunciations. Pouring out of this victory lap is infinite, volatile, unstable, heightened and absolutely free desire. The audience can therefore ask themselves: is it about loving all those that we are or about examining the relentless loneliness experienced when other people are around?
Choreography: (LA)HORDE
Costumes: Salomé Poloudenny
Music: Pierre Avia
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
OIWA
PEEPING TOM
Duration: 17 min.
In an abstract immensity, between life and death, mental state and holding on for survival, Oiwa creates a vision of the fragile balance between attraction and repulsion, suffering and solace. We become witnesses of the psychological and physical forces at work in a couple’s relationship. The duet puts before us a paradox: within the perfect balance, there is always a possibility to fall and break the balance by giving yourself completely.
Do you take the risk, or do you try to keep control to avoid falling? Do the plunges that break the balance happen by accident, or are they voluntary? The title comes from the classical Japanese story of Oiwa. Set in the 17th century, and based on real events, at the heart of the story is Oiwa, who was happily married until her husband fell in love with another woman. Driven by the desire to be with his mistress, the husband decided to slowly poison Oiwa, thus avoiding any possible accusation of murder. Throughout her gradual demise, she suffered greatly, with her hair falling out and her face starting to deform. After her death, however, Oiwa vowed to take revenge for the harm she suffered.
She returned as an onryo, a ghost that seeks revenge. Writers would later use the myth to challenge traditional views of male and female roles, and Oiwa’s story and transformation into a ghost became a defence of women’s positions in Japan.
The starting point for the performance Oiwa itself was the love duet created in The hidden floor with the dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater in 2017, and afterwards adapted in Peeping Tom’s own Triptych. In The hidden floor, a couple is put into an extreme context – a sinking ship that is slowly taken over by the forces of nature – in which they are trying to survive. Oiwa presents an evolution in the couple’s story, venturing into a supernatural state of mind, a dimension made up of memories, imagination and ghosts of past and future lovers. The duet is the first collaboration between Peeping Tom and the Ballet National de Marseille.
Concept and direction: Franck Chartier
Created with and performed by the dancers of the Ballet National de Marseille
Sarah Abicht, Nonoka Kato, Daniel Alwell, Dovydas Strimaitis, Martha Eckl, Riley Fitzgerald, Jonatan Myhre Jorgensen, Aya Sato, Antoine Vander Linden, and César Faria Fernandes (NDT), Chloé Albaret (NDT)
Artistic assistance: Louis-Clement Da Costa
Sound design: Raphaëlle Latini
Arrangements of La Sonnambula: Atsushi Sakaï
La Sonnambula perfomed by Marie Lombard (voice), Marion Martineau, Robin Pharo, Atsushi Sakaï (violas da gambe), Erwan Boulay (sound engineer)
Assistant costumes: Héloïse Bouchot
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
CONCERTO
LUCINDA CHILDS
Duration: 9 min.
Concerto is a nine-minute piece created by Lucinda Childs that premiered in Lisbon on 16 September 1993 in which she re-engages with short forms.
Black-clad dancers move against a grey background, between fragility and virtuosity. An organic connection is forged with the Henryk Górecki’s music, whose non-linear structures disrupt the clarity of the minimalist lines of her choreographic vocabulary.
After recreating Tempo Vicino in 2021, for this programme Lucinda Childs is reworking Concerto for seven dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille – direction (LA)HORDE.
Choreography & costumes: Lucinda Childs
Assistant choreographer: Jorge Perez Martinez
Music: Henryk Górecki
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
LES INDOMPTÉS
CLAUDE BRUMACHON AND BENJAMIN LAMARCHE
Duration: 9 min.
Les Indomptés is a male duet nine minutes long created by Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche in 1992 to music by Wim Mertens. Staged for dancers from the Jeune Ballet de France who they encountered in Manila, the duet has been performed hundreds of times all over the world, and notably in 1999 by Marie-Claude Piandragalla whowanted to bring a new energy to the Ballet National de Marseille.
This violent, yet passionate duet explores a way of moving that is hidden in us in order to rediscover our primary animality, “find the tear and desire in a body that is offered up, allow the movement’s volcanic activity to vibrate”.
After entering the repertoire of the Opéra de Paris in January 2021, Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche suggested staging this two-hander again for the programme, offering a blend of volcanic activity and sensuality, softness and brutality with dancers from the Ballet National de Marseille – Direction (LA)HORDE.
Choreography: Claude Brumachon
Assistant choreographer: Benjamin Lamarche
Music: Wim Mertens
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
ROOM WITH A VIEW – EXCERPT
(LA)HORDE
Duration: 15 min.
Room with a View is devised as a difficult awakening of consciousness, a march forced by the crushing prospect of collapse, an exploration of our bodies’ boundaries and necessary interdependences. (LA)HORDE’s choreography meets Rone’s music to express the suffering and legitimate anger felt by today’s generations who are seeking to rally together communities of celebration and battle to make sense of it all, and who over and over again play out the world’s abuses in a loop in a bid to exorcise them.
In a fifteen-minute excerpt from Room with a View adapted for this programme, (LA)HORDE continues their exploration of forms of uprising, protest and rebellion through dance in a murky space conducive to bringing out the paradoxical beauty of chaos.
Choreography: (LA)HORDE
Costumes: Salomé Poloudenny
Music: Rone
Lighting design: Eric Wurtz
Co-production of Room with a View: Théâtre du Châtelet, Grand Théâtre de Provence
ABOUT THE CREATIVE TEAMS
(LA)HORDE
Formed in 2013 and heading up the CCN Ballet National de Marseille since 2019, (LA)HORDE is comprised of the artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel.
Through films and performances (Novaciéries, 2015; The Master’s Tool, 2017; Cultes, 2019) and choreographic pieces (To Da Bone, 2017; Marry Me in Bassiani, 2019; Room with a View, 2020), they question the political scope of dance and map choreographic forms of popular uprising, whether they are widespread or isolated, from raves to traditional dances by way of jumpstyle. Their exploration of new dynamics in the circulation and representation of dance and the body that have emerged online led them to develop their concept of “post-internet dances”. After Room with a View, which premiered in 2020, in 2021 they invited four choreographers who each embody a symbolic, inclusive and engaged choreographic writing – Lucinda Childs, Tânia Carvalho, Lasseindra Ninja and Oona Doherty – to present a mixed programme with the Ballet National de Marseille. By diversifying their media, (LA)HORDE questions the quasi-infinite serendipity offered by this new territory and proposes multiple gazes of rebellions by these communities, working with them in a non-hierarchical way.
Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud
Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud have been collaborating and creating a wide range of works together since 2005. They tackle the body and exalt it with a radical physicality, right up to its most taboo aspects, such as in Pâquerette (2008) and Sylphides (2009). Tireless explorers, they bring all the practices and traditions into dialogue with one another to deploy a rich and brazen vision of dance. For example, Dub Love (2013) blends classical dance and Jamaican dub and Dance Polyphony (2015) mixes dancehall with mediaeval polyphonies, an approach they used in DFS (2016).
Their transgender universe, in its acceptance of identities and disciplines, shatters conventions.
PEEPING TOM (Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier)
Peeping Tom is a Belgian dance and theatre company set up by Gabriella Carrizo and Franck Chartier. Along with Eurudike De Beul, who has been part of the company from the outset, they created their first joint piece Caravana (1999) set in a mobile home.
From the outset, the company stood out for the diversity of the people in it, with differences in bodies, age, nationality and expertise. It has performers of eight nationalities aged between 26 and 80. Close to the methodology used in cinema, a new work always begins with the search for a set design both to impose a constraint and a dramaturgical setting.
Peeping Tom’s trademark lies in a hyperrealist aesthetic sustained by a realistic stage design: a garden, living room or cellar for the trilogy Le Jardin (2002), Le Salon (2004) and Le Sous-Sol (2007) or two residential caravans in the midst of a snow-covered landscape in 32 Vandenbranden (2009).
Lucinda Childs
Born in 1940, Lucinda Childs has been fascinated by dance and theatre since she was a child. An encounter with Merce Cunningham was a crucial turning point for her and she joined a group of artists brought together by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown in the Judson Dance Theater before embarking on her own choreographic career in 1963 with Pastime. From 1968, she applied a logic to deconstructing the classical vocabulary and established her own company in 1973, developing a repetitive minimalist dance in which rhythm, energy and a sense of space make their mark. Always seeking out novel collaborations, in 1976 she participated in Einstein on the Beach, Bob Wilson’s opera to music by Philip Glass, performing the choreographies of Andy de Groat.
In 2021, (LA)HORDE invited Lucinda Childs to reconstruct her piece Tempo Vicino more than ten years after its creation for the Ballet National de Marseille.
Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche
Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche have created more than seventy original choreographies with their dancers and other companies in France and abroad and with children. Among other works, in 2012 they created Ashbury St, a choreography inspired by the hippie movement, then La Traversée with a group of disabled teenagers, and Indicibles Violences for the festival Le Temps d’aimer la danse in Biarritz.