Greetings!
I am writing this editorial to announce the new season, which starts in September... but I mustn’t forget the 182 dancers who took part in our letting-off-free happening on Sonnborner Strasse during Wundertal! Or the incredible number of people who turned out that day! THANK YOU ALL and the incredible crowd that came!
I came here, as you know, to work with the legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, but, on May 21, I realized that I did come to meet ALL OF YOU. To dance together with this unique city, to make it dance, as Pina Bausch knew how to make us dance in our minds and in our, sometimes devastated souls. So that we could meet with each other, professional dancers, dance students, high-school students, actors, amateurs aged 16 to 88, dancing madmen, crazy people dancing who do not count their efforts and throw their bodies into the battle, madwomen who don’t spare their energies and throw their bodies into the battle rush headlong into battle.
Where were we…? For the past several months, we’ve been working on the first new piece by Tanztheater Wuppertal: Liberté Cathédrale. We’re rehearsing at the Neviges Mariendom. As the church organ resonates with the silence within, we go into a trance to the pealing of bells from all over Europe, we sing Beethoven in one breath, as if in apnea hanging on to every note. We can’t wait to welcome you in September in this incredible monument built in 1969. Right afterwards, we’ll be taking the piece on tour for at least two seasons; I believe, however, that premiering it there, on the stone floor of the church, will have a very special resonance.
In November, we suggest Club Amour: an evening centered on desire, sexuality, symbolic and actual nudity... Café Müller is folded into the raw-performance side of my work, along with two “nude” pieces from my repertoire which we are restaging at the Opera house, namely Aatt enen tionon and herses, duo. On that occasion, we will close the evening by letting our bodies run wild: this “club” doesn’t go against our well-rehearsed art but takes responsibility for its need of unnegociable freedom.
We will return in January with a new restaging of Nelken. The piece may well be the company’s masterpiece: it is delicate, difficult to control, and the unforgettable roles of Anne Martin, Lutz Förster, Dominique Mercy… continue to haunt us. I think the company is looking forward to regain the unique troupe spirit that the piece produces, with its stunts and children’s games, security threats and cicada dances before the coming storm.
Viktor will be another major recreation of a Pina Bausch piece. The entire Ensemble, joined by a troupe of older men, will transform an earthen grave into a choreography of body and affect.
In parallel, we will be presenting Café Müller in Istanbul, Vollmond in Mulhouse, and Sweet Mambo in Paris. Club Amour will travel to Valenciennes, Amiens, and Berlin; Nelken to London and Luxembourg; Liberté Cathédrale to Lyon, Lille, and Paris. The program is dense, but the company is solid, beautiful, fortified with its history written in the present.
Last but not least: Terrain is the production structure I founded in France, and with whom I develop my work, particularly in the Hauts-De-France region. Tanztheater Wuppertal and Terrain work together throughout the season, as we have seen during Wundertal. This enables me to forge a strong partnership between the two regions, the two countries, and the two artistic teams. The season’s agenda includes the tour dates of my repertoire, and it is indeed one single joint artistic project that is taking shape as part of this program, with the support of the two complementary institutions Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina Bausch, Boris Charmatz Terrain: we’re inventing a new “Grund,” a new “Tanzgrund” that will make us all dance beyond reason.
Over the course of the season, we’ll be adding other acts to these performances. But first thing first: in September, an existential choreography in a Brutalist church. COME AND JOIN US!
Boris Charmatz, June 2023