You’re coming to the Festival d’Avignon this year with two shows, EXIT ABOVE at La FabricA, and En Atendant, which you presented in 2010 and are reprising right where you created it: in the cloître des Célestins. Both those works, in spite of their different musical sources and references, examine our relationship to the act of walking. Let’s talk about EXIT ABOVE…
Although Bach’s work has been a great companion lately, pop music remains a recurring starting point in my choreographic work. Pop is probably one of the musical genres people tend to discover and listen to first, thanks in large part to its recognisable, catchy melodies. Also, with pop music, and in that sense with what we more generally refer to as popular genres of music, there’s an immediate physical identification within the body of the listener: the beat invites you to dance. I’ve been through countless parties where I heard a large diversity of music, from pop to chanson, from punk to rock.
EXIT ABOVE explores an essential popular genre: the blues. Why did you choose this genre?
As I explored pop music, I wondered about its origins. The blues, which as a reminder is African American music, is in large part the source of modern pop. Likewise, many popular genres find their source, for instance, in traditional folk music. They’re the descendants of the spirit of the troubadours: they exist because there is a desire to share emotions and stories, according to a precept that guides them in an almost existential way: “If you can’t say it, sing it.” In one way or another, in all sorts of countries and communities, there’s always been a musician to pick up a fiddle and make people dance. In the blues, people clap their hands, strike their thighs, their jeans: it’s a form of participation at once individual and collective. Beyond pop music, my choreographic writing has also been influenced by other more secret sources, which feed a certain form of dramaturgy without revealing it. In that sense, I’ve always drawn inspiration from the early 17th century, from Shakespeare’s plays, like The Tempest: even in this “invisible” way, this time period, those works, those artists, inspired my creation of this new choreography.
You’ve chosen to call on one of the greatest bluesmen ever…
Yes, this show is based on the song “Walking Blues”, by African American singer and guitarist Robert Johnson. He composed and played his own songs mostly in the 1930s—but he had an essential influence on many bands from the decades that followed: The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, or Eric Clapton. That music speaks of both personal joys and pains, and exists in a conversation with both slavery and religious rites, which lends it many biblical echoes. One should also think of this music within its historical context, that is, tied as it is to the history of the reproducibility of songs thanks to the rise of records, which made accessing and sharing this music easier, as was the case with photography. When speaking about pop music and other popular genres today, don’t we speak of the music “industry?” Pop music, and before it the blues, belongs to a history of recording which was made possible through the amplification of instruments—a history which is also that of our capitalist world, with its contracts and profits.
EXIT ABOVE also features three musicians.
I was going through my records when I found, in one of them, a letter with a phone number: it was written by Jean-Marie Aerts, sound architect of TC Matic, the band founded by Arno. Many remember this renowned and influential Belgian group, which rose to fame in the early 1980s with titles like “Oh La La La” or “Putain Putain”. I contacted this guitarist and producer, then I met Meskerem Mees, a young Flemish singer-songwriter of Ethiopian descent, a real heir to the tradition of songwriting. Meskerem Mees—who’ll also dance in the show—wrote songs inspired by blues standards about the great flood in the Mississippi delta in 1927, as well as by The Tempest, for instance. She’ll perform those songs live, alongside dancer-guitarist Carlos Garbin. As for Jean-Marie Aerts, he’s produced songs referring to dance and to beats.
By using the words Walking Blues, the parallel with your conception of walking becomes almost natural.
Dance serves to organise movements through space along a vertical axis and a horizontal one—in that sense, a walk is but a possible dance. It can become dance due to the speed at which the dancer is walking, or to their relationship to gravity, their rhythm and breathing, even the beating of their heart. And walking is of course very closely tied to the lower half of the body: in many popular dances, it’s footwork that matters, not the upper half of the body. The arms can sometimes help defy gravity, but what mostly matters is how one shifts one’s weight. We’re always advancing along an “angle”—so close to the word “angel!” When you’re shifting your weight thus, there’s always a moment of suspension brought on by the possibility of a fall: there is in dancing a desire to overcome gravity, to transform a walk into a run, with the hope maybe of taking flight.
The music used in En Atendant, which comes from the period of the Black Death in the 14th century, finds a mirror today in the Covid-19 pandemic. EXIT ABOVE connects the individual and the group, solitude and the community. How do you see the world today?
There’s a modern paradox that En Atendant might be about, despite itself: our obsession with protecting ourselves from nature means that our bodies have grown distant from their own movements. We’re at once all-knowing and fragile. We’re living in an exceptional demographic context, with ten billion people on the planet. Once you get to this stage in the History of mankind, the question might be: are we or are we not on the Titanic? The idea that we’re at the heart of a vortex, of a storm, brings up more questions, but also questions us in our relationship to nature. We can see this situation everywhere, at very different levels depending on countries and cultures, and on our standards of living. Is it about staying hopeful? I hear a lot of talk about the end of the world, or the end of a world. And we are indeed “hoping for hope.” There’s a limit to demographic growth, and to this capitalist system which is colonising the future. But does that mean, as far as I’m concerned, that the Rosas choreographies are a celebration of life? All those questions find an echo within us, within me. The pandemic, and before it the rise of climate change, created a world that’s very different from the one where I spent my first few years of creation. There’s no point in saying “après nous, le déluge.” The storm’s already here. It affects everyone, though one part of the world suffers much more. I could say: let’s bet on beauty. But as a European artist, I live, thanks to our artistic creations and performances, in a parallel world; I’m not afraid to say it, to admit it. At the same time, with the presence of technology, of artificial intelligence, robotisation, etc., there’s also another parallel world that’s appearing before my eyes. It’s the consequence of extreme consumption, of a societal and political dependency we chose. Which we continue to choose and to practice. Many of us live in a situation of luxury and privilege that’s largely revolting. We appoint ourselves judges when most people are feeling the immediate effects of this situation. Looking at this catastrophe, should we try to backpedal for the future? To reduce our means? Should we withdraw? Those are the questions I ask myself. It’s a field of uncertainty that forever exists between my own body, my loved ones, and the world that surrounds us.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet and translated into English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach