Rebot

Waking up

Alice Negri, Anna Giulia Mauro and Viva Tange, three girls adhering to the TeenNEXTers project, tell us, in this critical article, about the only “SOMNOLE”, viewed during the NEXT Festival.

Remove dance from formal constraints, break it down and rearrange it, to get to know it in depth, to know how to shape it.

Adapt your body to greater possibilities, use the stage as a laboratory, experiment, to fuel thediscovery of new physical languages.

All of this French director, choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz works with all of this.

As soon as the lights of the theater come on, what we see is the body of a man overwhelmed by the call of sleep, who lets himself be led by it into a dimension of profound dozing. This state of alienation, this condition that still the body of Boris Charmatz on the ground, is interrupted by the slow, but inevitable recovery, a desperate rebirth. It is the melody of a faint whistle, the one that accompanied his body in the course of his awakening.

But how do you get out of hibernation?

How do you learn to walk again, in a world we no longer recognize?
The dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz shows us the difficulties that can entail coming out of isolation.
He does this through extreme effort, with whistle that changes over time, similar to a panting cry. Through the sweat, which flows up his tense muscles.

We can only be spectators of such profound suffering, of an acute effort, so sharp as to break the fourth wall, totally involving the public. While the dancer rediscovers the rooms of his unconscious, poised between dream and reality, between awakening and relapse into the limbo of latency, his incessant whistle continues. Sometimes it reaches very high peaks, at other times it becomes lower, following the trend of its
movements.

The artist said he knew this sound, as a child, during recess, he whistled classical compositions, and during the performance he creates melodic reminiscences.
Boris chooses not to live passively anymore, to not escape the light, open his eyes and escape from the dream-refuge.

His emotions, expressed through the movement of the body, snappy and then exhausted, suddenly vital and then barely tangible by reason, are expressed through the use of the body alone.

Why what else do you need?

A body long locked up, long held back, now shows us the disturbances of a mind.
We cannot help but recognize them, recognize ourselves.
We all wake up.

Alice Negri, Anna Giulia Mauro and Viva Tange
Photos : Next Festival