Can you tell us how you first met, and what made you want to work together?
Michikazu Matsune: I met Martine in Paris in 2007, after a festival for which we both presented performances. I remember her work well: it was a group show, light and full of offbeat humour, which included a scene in which Theo started counting for no reason from 1 to 10, to 20, to 50, to 80… and he only stopped at 243. There was something fascinating about this scene, about how abstract and absurd it was.
Theo Kooijman: I was actually counting the number of days I would be getting paid as a temporary worker by Pôle Emploi, smiling until I cried…
Martine Pisani: We then met again with Michizaku for an artistic research laboratory which took place in Vienna. I invited him to work with a team of dancers, writers, and plastic artists.
M. M.: This laboratory allowed me to learn more about her work. We kept running into each other for a few years, then we lost touch. In 2018 I was back in Paris for a performance, and during my show, I saw someone in a wheelchair in the audience. After the show, that person came to see me, and it was Martine, along with Theo. I was very surprised, for we hadn’t seen each other in ten years, I didn’t know she was ill. We talked over dinner, and I learned that Martine was working on the theme of negativity. She said Theo now counted in reverse, minus 1, minus 2, minus 3… Martine’s humour was just as sharp as ever! I laughed, Theo smiled. We promised to keep in touch. That new encounter became for me the starting point for this project. I wanted to know even more about her work, her life. I was able to learn more in the fall of 2021, then in January 2022, when I visited them for two weeks and was able to go through Martine’s files. What I found there was a treasure, a gold mine of information about her early creations in the 1980s and 1990s. I knew right away that I had to share Martine’s work and story.
Why did you want to stage the show in a place you imagine in Japan, when the performances will actually take place in Avignon, Paris, or Vienna?
M. M.: Martine and Theo are both lovers of Japanese art—haiku, ukiyo-e prints, and cinema. While I was visiting, Martine told me that she’d always wanted to visit Japan. That night, an idea came to me, like a beautiful fireworks explosion in the sky. Let’s go there using our imagination and present this work!
M. P.: There is always, in my work, the intent to imagine situations. Imagination and fiction are great sources of creation for me.
M. M.: Martine is from Marseille, I’m from Kobe. Although we’ve led different lives, we’re connected by those seaside cities, by childhood memories on the beach. Historically, those cities are also connected by the fact that, when Japan was first open to commerce with the outside world, the ships which left Kobe would then make their way to Marseille.
T. K.: They’re also twin cities, it’s an additional link that gives them a universal aspect. Another fun fact: there are a lot of cicadas in Kobe, just like in Marseille. They’re the subject of many haiku: yet another link!
M. M.: Those anecdotes, those personal stories we shared, are like small fragments, archives collected throughout our lives…
M. P.: … but they also speak of History, which affects us all. And starting from History, we’re trying to reach the personal, to create connections.
M. M.: It’s a real collaboration between our different ways of doing art, Martine, Theo, and me.
M. P.: We talked, had arguments, and composed this show.
T. K.: We also each have our own way of approaching things, and it was very interesting to watch the ways we would react, the way we work, our interests and passions.
How did you select the dance sequences, which were sometimes reconstituted based only on your notebooks and a few memories and photographs, and how did you work on them?
M. M.: I asked dozens of questions and we tried to structure the story of Martine’s professional career chronologically, starting in the 1980s. I also used her archives, in particular her notebooks, texts, drawings, and photographs. They’re very personal documents. While going through those documents, I tried to absorb them as much as possible, paying particular attention to how they made me feel, to the stories they told me. I’m thinking for instance of the only video remaining of her early performances, a film shot on super 8 which shows Martine rehearsing in choreographer Odile Duboc’s studio. That recording is a striking example of a time and of Martine’s work, her appearance, the way she dances. Those are images I wanted the spectators to see. I also wanted to draw a connection between those images and a photograph taken during my childhood, almost at the same time, in which I’m swimming at the beach with my family. Our idea is to have past memories interact while looking at them from our vantage point today.
T. K.: During rehearsal, we worked on a small number of reconstituted dance sequences, which serve as the show’s starting point. It all started from there, and even though we can’t possibly recreate those dances perfectly, the spirit of Martine’s work is still very present. Dance is everywhere, the space of the studio has become a dance, and so have the texts, photographs, and memories.
M. M.: This old material reconstituted on stage is but a small part of the show, which also focuses on what’s been forgotten, what’s disappeared to history, on the erasing of the past. It’s also a show about remembrance, about memories and their limits.
Moments of dance cannot be recreated perfectly, because such precision is impossible. What does this transposition bring?
M. M.: What matters is the imagination, what the spectators can imagine of that dance, and what we, performers, imagine. Martine can bring up a memory, and from there, we have to project ourselves into and imagine what memory can’t grasp. It’s fascinating. It’s something that disappears, which doesn’t remain like a concrete, tangible material would. Dance is in and for the moment, and then it disappears.
T. K.: When a show or a movement is taken out of its context, it ceases to exist, you can’t reconstruct it.
M. M.: Theo and I will recreate a sequences from Deux femmes courant sur la plage, which is from 1986. It’s a show she created and performed with Sabine Macher. This time, it will be two male dancers performing the choreography as if we were on a beach in Kobe. What was a duo of two female dancers will be reinterpreted differently by a duo of male dancers.
M. P.: For this sequence, there’s once again that link between Picasso’s painting—which inspired the title of the show and the choreography itself—and Marseille, the water, the beach, Kobe…
Martine will also be on stage…
M. M.: The challenge of the show for me was to have Martine join us on stage. I really wanted her to be physically there. It was a necessary condition for the show, her return to the stage, a celebration. When we started working on this challenge, we came up with a few ideas which we tried out to see how we could do it…
M. P.: Michikazu left me no choice [beaming]; but I want to say I never really felt like I’d left the stage, because I kept dancing through the bodies of the performers with whom I work. We had to answer the question of how I could come onstage in my current state, that is, in a wheelchair. It’s very hard to talk about our most intimate memories, our personal stories, but I’m willing to play along.
Interview conducted by Malika Baaziz and translated into English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach