They enter the stage dressed for town, anonymous urban young people. When they take off their clothing, folded in small piles, they don another garment, that of the near-nudity of their bodies wrapped in a simple blanket. They have become other young men, other young women, while remaining the same. But they are no longer protected, they are not longer beautiful, they are no longer anything. Nothing but gestures, cries, but also chattering of teeth, sticking out of tongues, blinking of eyes, knitting of brows, asymmetric rocking of heads, appearances of lopsidedness, crooked walks, falls and more falls. All the body's tics recompose a language, that of the most deprived: the language of idiots, the grammar of the handicapped, the fidgeting of the simple-minded. It is by passing through this return to the first stage of the body that the dancers reach a supreme form of virtuosity in which agitation crea?tes a system and nervousness is transformed into emotion. In this play, marked by purification, Alain Platel, who is never acknowledged as choreo?grapher, recovers, nevertheless, here the literal meaning of the word "chorea", a medical term describing a disease of the nervous system, whose symptoms are uncontrolled movements and poor coordination of gestures or words. He also recovers one of the masters of comprehension of the autistic world, Fernand Deligny, and transposes, on the stage, the interior wealth of these behaviours that to us seem dictated by madness. This view is extraordinarily subtle and precious: aren't the beings we are shown affected by an evil that eats away at us all? Wouldn't they be the fragments of a humanity that is dismembered, that drifts and that only puts itself back together during a karaoke of golden oldies? When they finally abandon their blankets, the garment of the shipwrecked or the cape of new pilgrims, and put their own clothing back on, the dancers of les ballets C de la B once again become "normal". They seem more beautiful to us, however, more exact, because they now carry the mark of the essential on them. ADB
Distribution
conceived and directed by Alain Platel
dramaturg Hildegard De Vuyst
assistant director Sara Vanderieck
light Carlo Bourguignon
sound and electronic music Sam Serruys
costumes designer Dorine Demuynck
created and performed by Elie Tass, Emile Josse, Hyo Seung Ye, Kaori Ito, Mathieu Desseigne Ravel, Mélanie Lomoff, Romeu Runa, Rosalba Torres Guerrero, Ross Mc Cormack
Production
production les ballets C de la B
coproduction Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, TorinoDanza (Turin), Sadler's Wells (Londres), Stadsschouwburg Groningen, Tanzkongress 2009/Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Kaaitheater (Bruxelles), Wiener Festwochen (Vienne)
avec le soutien des Autorités flamandes, de la Ville de Gand, de la Province de la Flandre-Orientale