For this creation, you’re looking into the persistence—in both time and memory—of physical, sonic, and visual phenomena. What is the place of this show in your career as a young choreographer?
I’ve always been interested in the phenomenon of time. How does it flow? What did we invent to make it flow? How does it affect us? For my first show, Touch Down (2015), I explored the figure of the cheerleader and her function, which consists in entertaining crowds during downtime during a game. Picked up and largely exploited by the entertainment industry, cheerleaders seem to me like mythological figures, the sacrificial victims of a Kingdom called Sport-Spectacle. By confronting this archetypal figure to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Touch Down also explored the notion of downtime and asked this question: what is the cheerleader an icon of, and at what price? For my second show, Lignes de Conduite (2018), I looked into the history of tarantism. A phenomenon that mostly affected women allegedly bitten by tarantulas, to which dance—the tarantella—is both a cure and an outlet. A pagan practice that was then picked up by Christianity, tarantella has become a mainstay of choreographic folklore. Being neither of Italian descent nor a tarantella specialist, I decided to investigate how modes of showing affect practices of popular dance. What does a dance contained by a round (a form intrinsically tied to the possibility of transcendence) become when it’s approached frontally? With Diverti Menti (2020), a show co-written with dancer Maya Masse and three musicians from the Contrechamps ensemble, we looked into divertimento, a musical genre in vogue in the 18th century to entertain guests during society dinners. That show was the beginning of a change in my approach to composition, since I was no longer working on a pre-existing gestural code but trying to show music through the body. To that end, we chose a Mozart string quartet and replaced one of the instruments with a dancer. Since Maya and I can read music, our work consisted in developing tools to translate the musical score into dance in order to embody the characteristics of every musical line in turn (first violin, second violin, alto, cello). I continued this formal approach to translation when two contemporary ensembles commissioned a show based on Double Sextet, composed by Steve Reich. We created a Double Septet (2021), in which two dancers complete the musical formation to show how the American composer uses reflections and echo. I was still in this dynamic of translation of a pre-existing musical piece when I discovered Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’étoile in July 2020. Created in 1991, it’s a piece written for six percussionists, a magnetic tape, and the transmission of the astronomical signals of a pulsar, this residue of a dead start which emits radio waves according to a rapid, regular rhythm. When I first heard it, I was touched by the poetry of those strange celestial objects. I quickly felt the need to use Grisey’s score and to turn it into a choreography for six dancers. I was taken in by the way the composer can approach a sound, “zoom in” on what’s happening right before an attack. And then time passed… Between the moment I discovered Le Noir de l’étoile and the moment when I started my research work, alone in the studio, my perception of the world had changed. A year of on-and-off lockdowns and the war in Ukraine awakened old anxieties and created new ones. I no longer wanted to “hide” behind pre-existing scores. My emotions were rawer, my need to express myself more urgent.
Is that why you chose not to use Gérard Grisey’s piece as the music for your show, but instead worked on a soundtrack based on cartoon music?
When you listen to Grisey, there’s no doubt: you’re in the cosmos, and this cosmos is sacred! It took me a long time to realise that his poetics of pulsars found a much more personal echo within me. I’d never used biographic elements in my previous works, at least not directly. Tackling the memory of my father’s death here poses a massive challenge: how to approach tragedy? How to elude it, not to discard it completely, but precisely to use it in a vital manner. Using cartoons allowed me to take this step to the side. First because it reminds us of the world as seen through the eyes of a child. Then because cartoon music has its own rhythmic logic. That’s the genius of old Looney Tunes cartoons: the characters are caught up in their (often very basic) obsessions while the situations around them keep changing. The foundation of the musical writing for this show comes from a never-ending argument between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck who, threatened by hunters, wonder whether it’s rabbit or duck season. Since the memory I have of my father’s suicide is above all a sound, I entrusted to the music the role of supporting my uncertain memory. The sound design, composed by Flavio Virzi (electric guitar), Denis Rollet (Revox), and myself, was conceived as a palimpsest: several layers of memory come together, superimposed, constantly erasing each other only to be rewritten. That’s the magic of the Revox, this amazing recording apparatus: it’s a real time machine!
When you talk about L’œil nu, you draw a parallel between the persistence of the presence of your late father and the perception of the light from a dead star. You mention this time of travel, of memory, of space. Forms of time that are felt rather than measured. How did you work on the raw material for this show with your dancers?
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria was a sort of revelation. It focuses on a woman wandering the streets of Bogotá, obsessed by a loud BANG she heard at sunup and which she tries to understand and identify. A sound which, for the Thai director, contains the entire memory of the World. I saw in that film the possibility to have two dimensions coexist, one personal and one universal, and in that sense the possibility of staging the association in my mind of the explosion of the heart of a star and that of my father’s heart. The visual aspect of the show, embodied by the dancers, is never an illustration of my childhood memory. Their actions have their own reality, which follows its own rules. We worked together on degeneration phenomena: physical alterations or mental transformations. We asked ourselves how the organisation of a structure can break down when it loses its distinctive characteristics and its usual function. On the stage, the dancers create their own system: a constellation “drawn up” at the beginning of the show, which serves as the basis for all their relationships. After we came up with this system, we tried to break it down. L’œil nu isn’t an attempt to recreate a memory in its exactitude. The show calls on elements which contain memories as much as it works on the holes in memory. But what’s at stake here is the degradation and distortion of memory.
You’ll be performing in the cloître de la Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon. A beautiful space, with a great deal of depth. How did it inspire you?
We’ve transformed the cloister to turn it into a thrust stage, to make full use of the depth of the place. This configuration allows the show to be contained within the architecture while having a sort of vanishing point, a natural depth of field. The show opens with the (re)constitution of a constellation, which will be different every night. Under the night sky of Avignon, we hope to create the most surprising constellations!
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated to English by Geël Scmidt-Cléach