Your unique work as a choreographer lies at the crossroads between traditional and contemporary dance. Could you tell us about your journey?
My journey has taken shape and continues to unfold in the multiplicity of being, rooting itself in a movement, similarly to a nomad. Avignon marks a new stage in this journey: a time that will nourish my work as a choreographer and, beyond that, a time of life. I come here to listen to stories and to tell my own. As far back as I can remember, I have always slipped out of the house to play in the nearby alleys: twisting boundaries, stepping over them, or even ignoring them to make room for dreams, for the hope that something else might happen. Performances have always been there, before my eyes, in my village: there were artists, singers, dancers, storytellers... It was already a true school of the gaze where one could see, for an evening and a celebration, the butcher or a neighbour transform into incredible dancers, even though that wasn’t their profession. Why separate the ancestral and the modern when both feed each other mutually? Layers, strata, the multiple, the lasting and the ephemeral… that is what my journey is made of. It is the gestures, the traces, and their disappearance that interest me.
They always come back, a new creation for the Festival d’Avignon, takes place in the public space, on the square of the Palais des Papes. What was your approach?
For this first collaboration with the Festival d’Avignon, I wanted to come alone to meet new people in order to attempt a gesture in the public space, to create for and with a group I do not know, to allow myself and us to be touched by what initially seems foreign, to accompany people who do not know each other and help them become a group, enriching themselves through this encounter by making room for the sensitive and the unspeakable. The performance is not an end in itself: it is their attempts, their personal and collective journeys that move me.
The performance shares its participatory nature with Corbeaux, which you created in 2014…
Corbeaux had the particularity of being passed on to others starting from a core group of artists with whom I had worked for many years. The physical intensity of the piece was, in itself, exclusive, especially given the limited preparation time available. They always come back welcomes participants without any physical prerequisites, age requirements, or artistic experience. It is about accepting our fragilities and our modesty as much as our flights of imagination. It is from these that we build: we learn to listen to each other, to support one another, and to generously incorporate even the smallest gesture of the other. To do, to practice, to take a leap, to watch, to let oneself be surprised, to listen without judgment. What interests me, and what I find beautiful in each of the participants, is all the richness, the possible space that opens up through their gestures, and what each person, through their uniqueness, can ultimately teach us and show us. The moments outside of work, when we share a coffee for example, are a delight of discoveries, when one has the privilege of listening to their stories.
What themes do you explore with this group of amateur dancers?
The work consists of inviting this group, which didn’t exist before we started working on the show, to create connections and to make space for the sensitive, each with their own beauty, fragilities, and way of being. I would like to quote a 16th-century poem by Muzaffar Ali that Frédéric, one of the participants, shared with me on the second day of our work together. It directly echoes one of the ideas I had imagined and dreamed of even before meeting them:
“Your soul is so close to mine, that I know what you dream of.
Like a dream flowing through hearts, don’t you see that I spread through hearts?
Everything you can think, I know it, your heart is so close to mine!
I still have images very close; come closer and evoke my image.”
Creating a performance outside the traditional theatre setting involves different constraints than those on stage. How do you manage these constraints?
These constraints must be transformed into possibilities, even gifts. It’s about working with the place, which is a public space par excellence where we can, even if just for a moment, bring stories to tell and to dance. The architecture, the sky, the ground, the noise, the walls, the history, all participate with us and beyond us in shaping the gesture we create there. In this space, we bring together those who have decided to come see us, but also the passerby who watches for as long as they wish, standing, sitting, at a distance or close by, free to stay or continue on their way at any moment.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in February 2025