NÔT is inspired by the tales from One Thousand and One Nights. How did you decide to immerse yourself in this masterpiece of Arabic literature?
When Tiago Rodrigues told me that Arabic would be the guest language for this 79th edition, I thought right away of One Thousand and One Nights, which I’d read as a teenager. I must have been 13 or 14. I remember finding the book in my sister’s library and reading a few tales before putting it back down, thinking it was probably not appropriate for my age. When I rediscovered those stories and immersed myself in them again, I was struck by just how many influences and imageries they draw from: Persian, Arab, Indian… Those tales were part of an oral tradition before being written down: they travelled and were passed on through time, always keeping the energy of stories that are constantly reinvented. I’m particularly interested in this tension between orality and the written word, between what is immobile and what is in movement. NÔT is also a dive into the night, in the broadest, most metaphorical sense of the word, which blurs our perception and where fiction and reality become one.
One Thousand and One Nights begins with Sultan Shahryar, who decides to have each of his wives executed the morning after marrying them to ensure they never betray him. Scheherazade becomes his wife and tells him a story each night, postponing the ending until the next day, thus delaying her execution… In this labyrinth of tales, what was your guiding thread?
My way in was this framing story, the initial tale that triggers a series of stories, like a “tap” of stories from which the water never stops flowing. This first narrative tells of the confrontation with death, the survival instinct, the attachment to life and creative power. While constantly regenerating itself, the story has the power to bring about a new day. That is what moved me. The work also involves plays on scale, with smaller tales nested within larger ones. This idea of scale takes on its full meaning, both architecturally and historically, when creating a performance for the Cour d’Honneur. Here, two spaces face each other: on one side, the stone wall, and on the other, the shifting presence of the audience. There is an obvious dialogue in this confrontation between the gigantic and the tiny, which I find appealing. I wanted to explore this difference in scales through various aspects of the show: both through the choreography of bodies within this vast space and in the construction of the scenography. The idea of miniatures interests me: on one hand, the immense stage makes the performers appear miniature in the eyes of the audience; on the other hand, the faces of the spectators appear tiny from the stage’s perspective. The miniature is expressed not only through the physical representation of things but also metaphorically, through the situations we create. During the night, our perception of space, time, and scale changes radically.
How can choreographic movement grasp a work whose very essence is storytelling?
That’s a real question: how do you extract something choreographic from a literary work of such magnitude? These tales all tell of a life suspended. On one side, a king imprisoned by his necessity to kill; on the other, a citizen imprisoned and starving for justice. Who could this storyteller, this Scheherazade, be in our contemporary world? Who is prisoner or captive today? What does it mean to tell a story of survival now? Who would be these figures with animal bodies, and those who exist beyond the physical or earthly world? This presence of opposing forces, as possible in the tales as in our dreams, moves me deeply. I started with the idea of the minimum, with a small body, like a doll, for example. Starting from a detail, I write a choreographed score until a more complex situation takes shape and, by association, the scenes arrange themselves in relation to one another. The thread of thought can be interrupted at any moment, only to resurface later in the narration. This suspension, this suspense, is already very present in the text. There is an ambiguity in these tales that takes the form of a constant clash between law and desire, vice and virtue, greatness and smallness… This ambiguity and these tensions become powerful creative engines.
Those tales find a powerful resonance in our modern world…
Yes, the story of a condemned woman who, only through words and gestures, manages to survive the night does indeed resonate with our own anxieties about death, questioning our will to live and to transgress the law. I focused on what is common to all those tales: imprisonment but also desire, love stories as well as war and travel narratives. Jorge Luis Borges used to say that One Thousand and One Nights is about adding one more night to infinity. Because one thousand is, in itself, already infinite. I love this idea of continuity, both in a concrete and choreographic sense. You can never predict what will come next. There is something forever unresolved, something that resists.
Alongside your reading of the tales, did you have other sources of inspiration?
Yes, the night… NÔT means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole. I am also interested in the representations of the bed and the bedroom in the Middle Ages, simply because the frame story takes place in a bedroom, during the night. As in many creative processes, the dramaturgy of the piece is built mainly through analogy, between my research on the night, what I read in the tale, the images that form within me, and the associations that emerge during the work with the team. I also work on the principle of layering situations, spaces, and fabrics. The textiles pile up in layers, hiding and revealing themselves, like bodies, like stories. These different strata of images pass through a hybrid, undefined space that flirts with ambiguity and uncertainty. I like this ambiguity. The scenography explores border spaces, zones where life, or lives, are suspended. I envision the stage as a place of enchantment, crossed by desires. Desire can be frightening, but it is what allows us to move forward and create.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant in January 2025