Levée

Coproduction: Same Art Producers / Dimitri Chamblas and Amélie Couillaud.

Based on Levée des conflits by Boris Charmatz.

A labyrinthine performance, constructed on the basis of an extensive canon of derivative gestures, Levée des conflits is impossible to recreate in its totality: it is a snapshot of 25 simultaneous gestures that the eye cannot take in with a single glance. Rather than try to capture something of this perceptual experience, César Vayssié opted for an unclassifiable film, something between an abstract bird’s eye view, a documentary, and a genre film. Shot in the Ruhr region, on the “Halde Haniel” mining site — an immense plateau shaped like a spiral — Vayssié’s film propels the dance into an indeterminate zone, somewhere between science fiction and anthropology.

Stranded in this lunar landscape, the dancers appear to be carried by an entropic movement, caught in the downward spiral of emotions: the fatigue, the repetition, the bitter struggle with the gestural material are magnified as if under a glass, generating a chaos of juxtaposed physical states. Lashed by the coal dust, the camera lens makes its way through this moving mass, and, in a fragmentary way, reveals the participants in a strange ceremony that has no other purpose than the exhaustion of forms and the depletion of strength. What is there to see? What point of view to adopt? Is this a ritual recorded live, an extreme “flashmob,” a miners’ movement, or an ephemeral monument, visible only from above? Passing from confusion to a bird’s eye view, from sweat to structure, the camera affords us a glimpse of the organic and mathematical machine envisioned by Boris Charmatz: “a permanent and infinite dance on the dark mountain of Halde Haniel, for the man who had created it.”

Gilles Amalvi

Photography and editing: César Vayssié

Assistant choreographer: Anne-Karine Lescop

Sound: Olivier Renouf Director: Fabrice Le Fur

Dresser: Stefani Gicquiaud

Pilot: Holger Lubbe

Helicopter machinist: Thomas Lempke

Helicopter: Heli NRW

Camera equipment: Loca-images

Postproduction: Firm

Thanks to: Yves Godin and the team of collaborators in the performance Levée des conflits, namely the dancers Nuno Bizarro, Matthieu Burner, Olga Dukhovnaya, Olivia Grandville, Taoufiq Izeddiou,Thierry Micouin, Fabrice Ramalingom, and Nabil Yahia-Aïssa.

Heiner Goebbels, artistic director, and Marietta Piekenbrock, as well as Andreas Dietmann, André Grüss, Christiane Schmitz, and the whole Ruhrtriennale — International Festival of the Arts team.

Michael Sagenschneider and Bernd Lorscheidt — RAG Aktiengesellschaft.

Alban Teurlai, Thierry Demaizières, and Léo Monnet — Falabracks.

Matthieu Goeury, performing arts programming, Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gand.

Filmed on August 23, 2013 in Halde Haniel, Bottrop, Germany, with the kind permission of Ruhrtriennale — International Festival of the Arts and of RAG Aktiengesellschaft.