BODY AND MATTER

 

As a choreographer, my practice – whether outside or in a theatre space – is rooted in the process of making and manipulating natural, manufactured, visible and invisible materials, such as fabrics, costumes, masks, pigments, rocks, mirrors, lights, sounds… All have the status of full-fledged performers on stage. This relationship I have to materials conjures up different qualities in the body, it is the driving force that opens a dialogue between the body and the context of representation. With this attentiveness to sensations and perception a circulation can exist between body, materials, thoughts, memory, imagination, going from tangible to abstract, from reality to fiction.

 

My work in relation to materials goes hand in hand with my deep interest for colours. Being primary perceptive components, colours connect emotions and vision. I like to play with intensity and contrast, working with variations, going from black to white through all the colours of the spectrum. It is like going through constant metamorphoses in ever-changing landscapes.

 

I am also interested in the psychic and physical functions of the human body. For instance considering the natural and cultural contexts one lives and evolves in, one’s connection to other beings, human and non-human, to the infinitely small and the infinitely large, all these relationships being the multiple layers one is made of. Creating rituals, passages and metamorphoses, I am looking for what I would call « bodily archaeologies » rooted in the past or the future, as several ways to unfold every facet of one colourful palette.

 

POROSITY

 

This web of relations existing between body and materials is the key element to consider a continuity between the body and its surroundings. This connection opens a whole field of research where the human body is neither at the centre nor the main referential point anymore, but part of a whole, along with molecules, animals, plants, the cosmos, the muscular, emotional, historical and cultural states…

 

This dialogue leads to an animist way of being, where the dancer is not at the initiative of every action but rather a vector, a medium of the forces passing through him, inhabiting him and with which he interacts. Working towards reaching a porous state of the body is at the source of my choreographic approach, a primary condition. The body is not a centre but more like a filter, a living organism, where several events, time waves and stories are inscribed and coexist.

 

In this way, the performing space becomes a landscape made of many layers, plans and depths. The body is part of this landscape, it is included, surrounded and transformed by it, and vice-versa.

 

It creates a passive and active relationship to the surroundings, full of trance and transformation, where the dancer becomes part of the landscape and also animates, modifies and transforms it. The skin has also become an element of focus. Being an envelope or a membrane, naked, dressed or painted, it is a receptor and a threshold, a surface of passage between the inside and the outside of the body, an access to otherness and interiority. I am interested in exploring the frontier between beings and things, between natural and artificial, organicity and plasticity, living and non-living, presence and absence.