Cherry-Brandy

With roots in the visual arts and the circus and experience of mime, acting, the martial arts and improvisation, Josef Nadj’s starting point for “Cherry-Brandy” was a text by Anton Chekhov which deals primarily with time, the past and memory. The hero of “The Swansong”, which Chekhov wrote in 1886-87, is an old comedian left all alone in a dark and empty theater. Nadj’s reading of the work focuses on the heavy, memory-laden atmosphere of the “black box”, meaning the empty stage which is projected here as a black hole, a bottomless grave in which the ghosts of a spent life dwell.

As in his 1994 production of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”, Nadj has no interest in translating plot into choreography, preferring to read between the lines and convey the profound issues he finds there in fragmentary fashion. Moreover, although the award-winning choreographer and artistic director of the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans often tackles subjects and/or works traditionally held to be the preserve of the theater, he considers his work to be contemporary dance. This allows him to mix media and techniques and, as he puts it, “free-fall into the magic world of images”.

“Cherry-Brandy”, which Nadj was commissioned to create for a 2010 program encouraging Franco-Russian collaborations, allows the choreographer to return along with 12 performers to the archetypal theater, to play with the boundaries between reality and illusion and to eavesdrop on the pregnant loneliness and darkness of its space. He uses an abstractive, pared-down theatrical idiom to present a series of images whose philosophical and metaphorical hue reconnect us with the very roots of the theatrical art.