enfant

Created in 2011 with a group of children from Rennes, enfant is set up again in 2018 with a group of children from Berlin.

In his foreword to L’Inhumain, Jean-François Lyotard wrote: “Shorn” of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from and which calls on it to become more human.”

For the Cour d’honneur of the Popes Palace, Boris Charmatz will bring together an artistic team of 9 European professional dancers (from France, Greece, Portugal…) as well as 26 children living in Rennes. For the tour following the première it will be a smaller group of children. Adept of crossings, of mutating revivals, Boris Charmatz manipulates the choreographic material in order to reveal its underlying paradoxes, to displace the certainties of the gaze. Dance from photographs, dance-sculpture, dance hole – each of his projects attempts a bringing together of plastic forms and body movements. After Levée des conflits, spiral of silhouettes caught in an endless circulation, his new creation submits the multitude to another question: how to produce frictions, physical events without using muscular energy? Continuing the research initiated with régi about the machines, he proposes a choreography for inert bodies – a transit area crossed by a disturbing element called enfant (child).

enfant, like a malleable, fragile and uncontrolled material. A charge of reality upsetting the balance of the scene. Carried, laid down by the dancers, the children’s bodies invade the space, broaden it, sculpt it. From their relationships grows a game of tension and relaxation that mixes vis inertiae and transformation process. A strange numb ballet unfolds, where small islands appear, mobile gatherings; from where unstable encounters emerge, hybrid morphologies – images suspended between the rest, the dream and the round… Progressively, the relations become reversed, the border between the big ones and the small ones, the professionals and the amateurs, the living and the dead becomes undone, leaving room for a mass to be, an impetuous cloud carrying everything away: invasion or recreation – which gives back to the children their role of aethetic and political unknown quantity inside the show’s equation.

Gilles Amalvi

The documentary des enfants directed by Sophie Laly brings a perspective to the children’s work throughout the project.

Re-creation June the 21st, 2018 for Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin