Before choreographing Black Lights, you were but a spectator of the TV show H24, from which your show borrows many texts. How did you feel when you first watched it?
H24 is a TV show directed by Valérie Urrea and Nathalie Masduraud for Arte. It’s a very original idea: to commission 24 texts, 24 monologues, from 24 female authors of different generations and nationalities—and, therefore, in different languages. The theme is the everyday violence to which women are subjected, but also its lasting consequences and the physical and mental deflagrations engendered by those acts of violence. The short form gives each film a very “percussive” thrust. The whole thing is fascinating because of the links this series of films creates between form and content, director and author, text and history. It reveals an understanding of cinema that is rare nowadays. H24 is at once direct and precise, challenging and accessible. But while the films themselves were a source of inspiration, the starting point was my reading of the texts, which were published as a book by Actes Sud.
Literature is therefore the main source for this choreographic project…
Reading the texts by the 24 authors of H24 was the trigger for Black Lights. I was struck by their literary quality, by the added depth reading the book gave to those monologues. I forgot about the films, the screenplays, the direction, the images I remembered, to enter a cohesive literary world. Once more, literature is the source of my work on dance. It’s through literature that I go from reader to choreographer. The coherence of those feminist texts, in spite of their great variety, is due in large part to an extremely powerful declaratory quality, with short, compact sentences, and, I insist, a very “percussive” state of mind. They invite us to change the way we look at the victims of “everyday violence,” through an assembly of very different women.
How did you select the texts used in your show?
The authors of H24 come from very different countries, generations, and cultures. Reading the book lets you experience those differences. Some approach everyday violence in a very internal or “cerebral” way, others through physical states or powerful modes of narration, though they all start with individual anecdotes. The selection process took some time. The very first question I had to ask myself was, which of the texts would best fit the stage? This sort of selection uses very different criteria than for the production of a film. Some of the texts are written in the first person, with an “I” that requires a precise approach, the appropriate scenic decisions. The shortness of the sentences is a sort of particular address to the spectator, or to the reader. It creates a conversation with the audience. The form itself won me over, and that’s what I also tried to do: to create a direct connection between spectators and texts, said and embodied by eight dancers.
What pitfalls did you try to avoid?
I worked with my longtime collaborator, writer Stéphane Bouquet. In spite of their undeniable literary quality, some of the texts alter their power when read aloud. A text is, by its very nature, a signifier; its presence onstage, in a choreographic form, can suffer from its very qualities: the story is too complex, there are too many characters, even too much poetry! Some of the texts were automatically excluded. We made sure to pick texts that come together to create a montage. By which I mean a sort of subterranean understanding, an absence of repetitions, even though those texts necessarily echo one another because of their shared theme. Each comes with its own difficulties, although they use a simple vocabulary and syntax. I wanted to keep this general sense of power. With very few developments, and palpable emotion throughout the show.
With this conversation between several texts and a choreography, do you feel like you’re on uncharted ground?
Some of my previous experiences show this complicity in my work between the presence of a text and a choreographic approach. Such was the case for instance with La Place du singe in 2005, for which I collaborated with Christine Angot, who joined me onstage. Then there’s my more recent work with La Ribot and Tiago Rodrigues for Please please please. The real challenge, with eight dancers from different generations, cultures, and languages, is to create a sort of polyphonic space without forgetting about the audience. The body must be the vector of literature without becoming mere illustration, without turning the show into a series of sequences independent from one another. So I made sure to come up with several collective situations, each accompanied by several texts taken from the book, about ten in all. The responsibility of speech is shared by all the dancers. It’s at the heart of Black Lights to give to hear, and not just listen to, the sensitive approach through literature of those wounded women. The show is like an echo chamber steering clear of something that would be too urban or realistic, to lead us into an intemporal and tragic dimension. Its very basis is the absence of hierarchy between literature and dance. The challenge is not to have the body repeat what words have already made intelligible, but to find other ways for the dancing body to express modern forms of domination, oppression, and violence, but also of denial, struggles, and emancipation.
Black Lights was inspired by a series of texts commissioned from 24 female authors. It’s choreographed by a woman. What would you say your position is, at a time of unprecedented mobilisation against harassment and everyday violence against women?
It’s the first time my work as a choreographer has echoed current events in such a way. We’re still in the early stages of the Metoo explosion. This movement attests to a very clear social problem, one that’s widespread in our society, and therefore much “talked about.” But the stage is the place of rehearsal, but also of the repetition of life. It embodies a space where things have to be repeated and re-heard, rephrased. I don’t see myself in a position of pure feminist advocacy. I’m working on feminist texts. It’s not some worn-out topic. I mean, society’s talking about it! The power and legitimacy of this kind of story, that’s where there’s still so much work left to do. Women still need to be heard, and so do their stories. They’re often listened to, but rarely understood. While I’m not an activist, being on the stage allows me to speak up. As a dancer and choreographer, but also as director of the Centre chorégraphique national in Montpellier, then of the Centre national de la danse in Paris, I know the difficulties a woman in a position of leadership faces. As an artist, I feel a certain legitimacy to talk about it through those texts, those authors. I liked those texts because they are uncertain, fragile. Reading and re-reading them, I see them as expressing a form of disappointment. They’re not only political texts of advocacy; they’re a little hopeless as well. The women H24 and my show tell about are witness to situations they don’t have the strength to resist. They touch me because in my own relationship to dance, I’m not someone who shows up with precise, didactic intentions, to express through powerful and spectacular forms. My work doesn’t offer images of power, with superior bodies. Rather, those bodies tend to be wracked by doubt and complexity—even when I try to make them powerful, it doesn’t quite turn out that way. However, I hope that they are intelligent bodies. Black Lights is about a conception of dance tied to that theme. The idea, at a time of resistance and affirmation, is to tell the audience several stories, from up close. But on stage, you have to leave behind the fetishism of the story for a frontal approach, which enables emotions and questions. From there, I’m in my element again: the importance of scenography, the gathering of bodies freed from social codes, able to split in two, to share, to resonate in a polyphony of movements and words.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach