danse de nuit

Boris Charmatz is a choreographer in the most unconventional sense of the word; hugely gifted, provocative, a tireless critic of movement conventions, his work never ceases to pose questions about the nature of dance. From his first creative ventures, he has been seeking a free, ‘untrained’ form of expression, calling into question the codes of the fabricated spectacle, taking his productions off the stage and out into the open air, and redefining the established relationship between audience and performer. But Charmatz has never shown the slightest respect even for these innovations; despite a ‘lost innocence’ in their exploration of movement, his works reveal the desire to forge a link between dance and the primal pleasure the body can bestow when it is free of expectations, interpretative frameworks or limitations.

In “danse de nuit”, Charmatz takes dance back to its birthplace in the heart of the city. This ancestral linkage signifies dance’s receptiveness to various vibrant forms of expression, but also seeks to deconstruct or articulate all its characteristics, familiar or not, in a unique way and create a true “dance of the city” in the process. In essence, it’s an experiment whose upshot remains extremely hard to predict. Essentially, it isn’t the clarity of the message that matters, though; it’s the urgent sense of reinhabiting public space, forming a community of bodies, creating a strange rift which appears in the city at night.