‘20 dancers for the XX century’ presents a living archive.

Twenty dancers reinterpret famous solo works, celebrated or forgotten, by modern or postmodern artists from the past century to the present day. They appropriate, share, explain and revive them.

The project is a kind of archaeology that transcends the legacy of dance:

It is an attempt to free gestures from the past, to “restore” them and enable the dancers to reinterpret them for the present. ‘20 dancers for the XX century’ encourages an unencumbered approach to history: the dancers invent, sketch and devise from their own memories, their knowledge of these historical solos, their own patterns of movement, their state of mind. It is an exploration, research, approaching a new exhibition format from a museum perspective. It can take the form of a wild appropriation or a respectful homage.

Even though you would really need a thousand dancers to be able to represent the riches of the 20th century, twenty is almost enough to create a small collection. So it is possible to trace an arc from Charlie Chaplin to Liza Minnelli, from Valeska Gert to Ko Murobushi, from Mary Wigman to Pina Bausch, from William Forsythe to hip hop. And because we have already reached the Twenties of the 21st century, we have opened the format to the future. For the last couple of years, it has been called ‘20 dancers for the XX century and even more’. And here in Wuppertal twenty-six dancers will be dancing, with half of them coming from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and the other half from Terrain, my French production office.

Boris Charmatz, ‘20 dancers for the XX century’, 2012 and 2025

The entire opera house will turn into a stage! The audience can move freely throughout the building creating thus their own archive, getting lost, lingering and making new discoveries. There is no fixed programme, no predetermined timetable. Nobody knows exactly what is going to be performed where or when.

Duration: 3 hours