With three projects and a number of public engagements, you are the artist partner of this 78th edition. How did you choose the shows you’re presenting? What was the common thread of this “partnership”?
I had many conversations with Tiago Rodrigues about the presence of the Tanztheater Wuppertal at the Festival d’Avignon, fifty years after its founding and fourteen after the passing of Pina Bausch, its legendary founder. Bringing this company—of which I have been the director since 2022—to the Festival is no small matter! We quickly decided to create broader spaces for encounters and debates that would not solely focus on my work or that of Pina Bausch. It is more about exchanging ideas on themes that resonate with the shows presented, in line with the philosophy of the Festival d’Avignon: a Festival which questions our fundamentals while looking at the future. In a way, that’s what this programme is all about. With Forever, based on Café Müller, I wonder how to bring a major show of the contemporary repertoire into the future. Liberté Cathédrale, my first creation for the Tanztheater Wuppertal, is about the present of the company. As for CERCLES, which isn’t so much a show as an open research space, it allows me to explore what the future of the company might be. With those three shows, past, present, and future intertwine. In a sense, this programme is a game I play with time.
CERCLES is a workshop which invites 200 people to take part in a research project about circular dances. How did the idea for this project come about?
I wanted to look into the recurring figure of the circle in the history of dance. Circular formations are a long tradition, from ancient representations to traditional folk dances from all continents, as well as classical ballet and contemporary choreographies. Initially, I wanted to revisit La Ronde, which I created in 2020, composed of duets invented for the occasion and of iconic moments taken from the western choreographic repertoire (from Don Quixote to the works of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker). I ended up abandoning the idea of choreographic excerpts and decided instead to look into how we could give new shapes and dimensions to those circles, particularly by drawing on the memory of dancers. This exceptional and unique moment of research is also an opportunity for the audience to see and understand what dance work entails.
Throughout your career, you have regularly danced with amateurs or had them dance in your shows. In concrete terms, how do you work with this very large group? What does it bring you?
With Terrain, we first formed a group of eleven professional dancers to supervise this performance. After a call for participants, we created a heterogeneous group of amateurs over sixteen years old and students in artistic programmes from diverse age groups and cultural backgrounds, and with different bodily practices. Starting on 26 June, and for three days, we’ll meet for workshops before inviting the audience of the Festival d’Avignon to attend the sessions on 29 and 30 June and 1 July, where they’ll be able to see an artist and his team at work. Those projects with large groups of amateurs allow me to unfold and broaden a certain perception of dance. To make it visible, to experience it differently than on a theatre stage. There is something very concrete about coming together with non-professional dancers. It informs and transforms me! The question to me is not to know what I can do with them, but rather what it does to us, collectively, to call upon known choreographic materials, to question them, to reinvent them, to interpret them… It gives me the opportunity to try out new ideas and explore forms of movement that may not be traditionally associated with professional dancing. It’s a way of rethinking the norms of performance, to allow for a freer expression.
This large number of participants leads you to dance in an unconventional space: the Bagatelle stadium on the La Barthelasse island…
Indeed, this approach is part of a desire to move dance outside traditional spaces such as theatres and to explore new relationships between movement and our surroundings, similar to what I’ve already done when dancing in the street, on squares, in museums and galleries. Here, I like the fact that there are no bleachers or floor, that the spectators sit in a circle around us or can watch us from the bridge. It’s a very horizontal process, “democratic” I’d almost say, since we’re all on the same level! This kind of work and encounter creates not only a richness of movements and expressions, but also of perspectives.
Do you see this project as the starting point of a new creation?
I like the idea of bringing together people in unconventional spaces to witness happenings and unexpected occurrences. I don’t know yet what will become of it. What is however certain is that I am starting a new line of work here, at the Festival d’Avignon.
Interview conducted in January 2024 and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach