You’re coming to the Festival d’Avignon this year with two shows, Création 2023, 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 start with En Atendant…
En Atendant is the independent first part of a diptych which also includes Cesena, created the following year in the Cour d’honneur du Palais des papes. What ties them together is the use of the music, those 14th-century polyphonies, Ars Subtilior, performed by musicians from the Cour et Cœur ensemble, directed by Bart Coen. While Cesena took place from the dark of night till sunrise, En Atendant took place in the Cloître des Célestins just as night fell. This show played a large part in the evolution of my choreographic writing. It’s an aesthetic and ecological work, which tries to “maximise the minimum,” using only natural lighting. It doesn’t come “gift wrapped,” if you will. The point was, and still is, to focus on the presence of the trees, the two plane trees of the Cloître des Célestins, on the “closed” architecture of the place, in its historical dimension, even though the performance takes place under the ceiling of the sky. This desire to work in a space marked by the presence of stones, dirt, and leaves, took shape in collaboration with two artists for this diptych: Ann Veronica Janssens (Cesena) and Michel François (En Atendant).
In that sense, En Atendant carries a certain legacy. And that’s also true of the venue where it’s being reprised…
En Atendant was written with a generation of dancers who could masterfully carry, and still do, a choreographic project in the unique space of the Cloître des Célestins, which we could describe as being at once closed and open. This show was then performed in more conventional theatres, in black boxes. I see it as a real opportunity to be able to reprise this show from the Rosas “repertoire” in the very place where it was born. Even if there are recordings, performing arts works as such are bound to disappear. To reprise this one, beyond sharing it again, also means giving a second life to this choreography.
Ars Subtilior appeared right at the time of the Black Death, which left millions dead. There was no scientific explanation for it then. Those deaths remained inexplicable. How did you explore this music?
Ars Subtilior is often seen as intellectual music, because of the richness of its layers, its different tempos, the many things it’s saying. So many languages superimposed one on top of the other for a music created in a time of turbulence with a pandemic, the Black Death, but also the collapse of the social, political, and religious pillars of medieval society. For this show, we delved into the history of Avignon in the 14th century, a time of massive change that marked the end of a time and the beginning of another. This time of schisms literally found its way into this music, whose discovery turned out to be a major event for me. En Atendant is a work filled with silences, moments of waiting, and movements that could be the complete antithesis of tranquillity. We wanted a very rigorous form of writing, close to that music. I explored it thanks to this extremely simple movement of human mechanics: the walk. Walking as the first step in a potential dance, walking as the verticality of human posture, of the spine, walking as my own space and time at the junction between a vertical and a horizontal axes—the latter of which can be that of sociability, but also of a potential narrative.
En Atendant begins with broken-down bodies, afflicted by illness, death, and pain. Then they straighten up, start moving step by step, connected to the music…
In spite of its subject and its sources of inspiration, En Atendant can be seen as creating a definition of life through dance. At that time, the idea of mortality was present in a cruelly concrete way, including in that music. To dance this absence of life isn’t a contradiction in terms. It’s about celebrating a certain humanity in a mechanical, sensual, emotional, social, and spiritual way. En Atendant is the expression of a highly legible but highly complex formalism. We brought together two tenets that have underlain our choreographic writing and our company since its foundation: “My walking is my dancing” and “My talking is my dancing.” Breathing has its place in this show as a source of life; it’s a vital element explored in all its physicality.
En Atendant is a full sensory experience, playing with the light until it disappears and night falls. It seems to uniquely “resonate” today, now that we’re experiencing a new pandemic…
The starting point is that progressive disappearance of the light light, this entrance into night and an absence of light, without the use of any artificial lighting. There’s no set, either. The Cloître des Célestins is enough, with its ground and its magnificent plane trees! What I wanted to do, which was a conscious and strategic choice, was to explore this temporal potential in a world focused on technology, in which we communicate via screens. Covid amplified the importance of those technologies, since it became impossible to share a single space, to breathe the same air. I don’t like to be pessimistic, but back in 2010 no one could have imagined it. In the 14th century, no one understood where death came from. That rats could contaminate us was unthinkable. Not only are we in a time of pandemic again, but En Atendant has to be read differently now. It can be interpreted in terms of the importance of its environment. The experience of the spectator then included hearing the surrounding sounds, bird songs, the harmonics of the city. With biodiversity falling fast, there are fewer and fewer birds. But the shadows that lengthen as night falls remain. And so does this question, among others: what disappears in the light, or appears in the darkness?
The music of En Atendant, which dates from the time of the Black Death in the 14th century, finds an echo today in the Covid-19 pandemic. Création 2023 focuses on the relationship between the individual and the group, solitude and 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 to english by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach