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.
For many people, the words liberté (freedom) and cathédrale are contradictory! The title gives the impression that the show is on a fragile equilibrium between promise and danger. Under what circumstances did you conceive this show—your first creation for the Tanztheater Wuppertal?
It’s a title laden with meaning that I fully embrace! It is a reminder that, for instance, dance was considered a sin for centuries. Although my ideas for this show preceded my arrival at the Tanztheater Wuppertal, its title reflects the complex journey within a new creative environment I was given the opportunity to embark on. When I arrived at the Wuppertal, the company had been experiencing a kind of unresolved mourning for 14 years. In its own way, this show could express this powerful need to open the doors of a cathedral to the world as much as my desire to take the company out of its usual creative spaces, and particularly the legendary cinema Pina Bausch converted into a studio and where we are still fortunate to work.
You rehearsed and created this show in a consecrated place, the Mariendom church in Neviges. What were you seeking in this church?
I like complicated places! And the Church is such a place, for many reasons. One thinks, for example, of the paedophiles it has harboured, and still does… Being of Jewish descent and working in Germany, I may have tried to find the right place to stir up certain traumas. But churches are also places of refuge, where many come to pray, meditate, or heal. It’s also a place dedicated to the search for love. A place where we can go to ask ourselves questions. It’s a place that allows us to leave our bodies, to transcend it. It was also a response to a deep desire to choreograph something to the sound of the organ and bells. Those church sounds transcend the Church. They resonate with the architecture and carry messages of marriage, mourning, and danger throughout the city. They go through bodies and spaces, creating a form of permeability. They transcend themselves, allowing for a cathedral-like freedom!
Today, you’re giving the audience the opportunity to see it performed outdoors. How did you shift from one to the other?
I experienced a similar sensation when I created enfant in the Cour d’honneur du Palais des papes for the 65th edition of the Festival d’Avignon, in 2011. At first, it seemed impossible to perform it anywhere else. But the show ended up having an extraordinary life. Liberté Cathédrale moves and transforms. But we’re always carrying something of that church within us. Designed by German architect Gottfried Böhm and inaugurated in 1968, this monument is a remarkable example of brutalism, characterised by its direct geometric shapes and its use of concrete. Although it is a pilgrimage church, it is often occupied. Therefore, we could not privatise it. But thanks to abbot Thomas Diradourian, who deeply understood the nature of our project, we were able to inhabit it. I have to say, we all knew we wanted to spend some time there, in spite of the cold and the roughness of its floor. Since there are no pillars to support the building, the liturgical space is both immense and very peculiar. Unlike the churches I knew, the altar isn’t at the centre of the space, itself very horizontal. In a way, it’s a space that’s very close to a public place, or a stadium. It’s an agora in which we were free to imagine our choreographic assembly. We spent weeks in that church, rehearsing in full view of everyone, under the eyes of locals, pilgrims, and tourists. Now, no matter where we perform it, the show carries within itself traces of that time, of that architecture, of that permeability which allows it to adapt almost naturally to very different conditions of representation.
This show was built along several axes. What could be the tonalities of each of its five sequences?
“Opus” is based on the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 111, which the dancers sing in its entirety, a cappella… Even though it’s a piano sonata that’s almost unsingable! In this part, which I call “sung-moved,” they stretch their breathing to the maximum to be able to continue moving. It’s an almost existential moment. Danced to a mix of bell sounds recorded in different cities, “Volée” induces a trance-like state in the body. It’s a rather chaotic movement, made of complex rhythms, whose contradictory messages cause the gestures of the dancers to explode even as they’re all struggling to stay together. “Silence” is a clear reference to those moments of contemplation, of communion with the voices we have failed to hear, like those of the victims of abuse within the church whose testimonies we’ve since read. Based on John Donne’s poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” this passage is a sort of opening of the show to other sources, more profane, like the Peaches song “Fuck the pain away.” “Toucher,” performed to a deluge of organ music orchestrated by Phill Niblock, is essentially structured around the contact and permeability of the bodies. It was inspired by the quarantine period we experienced during the Covid crisis: a period which criminalised contact and separated bodies.
This creation is also the meeting between the dancers of your own company, Terrain, and those of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. In total, there are twenty-five dancers on stage. You like to work with large groups. Why is that?
Probably because it gives me more freedom to write based on what each dancer brings to the show! It’s a group piece, but there’s never unison. It’s as if each dancer was inventing their own path. I find it very interesting to watch. It gives the show several dimensions, and the audience can then choose to see it as an ensemble that breathes, falls apart, and comes back together, or by following the paths laid out by specific performers as they grab their attention. It has led to the creation of a very powerful artistic and human adventure, and I’d like to particularly thank the dancers who all embraced this project with enthusiasm in spite of difficult conditions, who all accepted to step out of their comfort zone. Each and every one of them gave me an incredible gift.
Interview conducted in January 2024 and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach