manger

We eat lying down we sleep on our feet we digest information we dance with our mouths full we sing while chewing we chew while walking we dance while thinking while singing while swallowing we launch movement with our mouths our lips our fingers that we suck our feet that touch the food on the ground dance is in the palate dance is in the teeth dance is in the tongue we take away the table and the chairs and the tablecloth we dispense with the ritual of the meal we imagine a sort of meal in motion we eat everything we eat anything all the time long food chain passed from hand to hand food disappears in the bodies the décor becomes invisible the choreography of people also becomes a choreography of food that traverses the inside of space then of the body the essence is packed down the throat we don’t want to die stuffed we go on a hunger strike our body becomes the strike of hunger our body becomes an object of strike we swallow the message we swallow reality we digest conflicts a child eats while dancing

Boris Charmatz, notes (extract)

“Choreographer and director of the Musée de la danse — a hybrid institution which digests formats and reframes bodies — Boris Charmatz subjects dance to formal constraints which redefine the field of its possibilities: a potentially infinite canon of gestures in Levée des conflits, inert bodies of children, animated by adult dancers in enfant… The stage is a notepad where he jots down ideas and organic concepts in order to observe the chemical reactions, the intensities, and the tensions engendered in their encounter. In manger, the center of gravity was subject to displacement: how to set bodies in motion not with the eyes, or with the limbs, but with the mouth? How to use this hollowness as a perceptual frame in its own right? The mouth is a crossroads where food, voices, breath, words, and saliva intermix: it is a locus of circulation, where the inside and the outside, the self and the other meet, taste each other, engage each other, interchange, and ingest each other. By picking up this metaphor as the vehicle for his choreography, Boris Charmatz marks out a general field of orality: paper chewed and swallowed is physical matter become a proliferating concoction. It swells, it sings, it is savored, it blends, it spreads mouth to mouth until it invades the whole space. In this continuous movement of ingestion, there emerge masticated melodies, paintings of flesh, sculptures of voice, food, and skin, which sketch a collective, sensual horizon. At the boundary between a mobile installation and an indeterminate sound object, manger is a “swallowed reality,” an ingurgitated utopia: a slow digestion of the world.”

Gilles Amalvi, extract from the programs of the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and of the Théâtre de la Ville – Paris