Con forts fleuve

(...) I’ve gotten used to managing clear-cut choices: stack the performers on a tower; dance next to a mass that doesn’t look like it weighs its immense weight; dance nude for a second time... in wigs. We’ve gotten through these impossible choices not too badly, through these impossible contacts, but I’m afraid that the next piece adds on a few too many of these exquisite contrasts. We’ll be too numerous: 7. Plus 5 walk-on bit players not walking a bit. And the performance will be broken-up by luminous eclipses - interruptions that won’t even allow the opportunity to construct a performance built of a thousand varied and changing bits. It’s more a matter of making these “bits” into a single stream, insistent. Stream of bodies the presence of which will be troubled in multiple manners. One of them: we’ll use a frontal space, not to order perspective, but to scramble foreground and background and tend towards indistinctness. Indistinctness continued by a continuous blanketing of blankets. Blankets suggesting comfort - but also suggesting the possibility of exploring the body as an element no more than suggested, only guessed at. One can only just perceive bodies, without knowing who is speaking - men or women - saying phrases (penned by John Giorno - the Giorno of the 60’s when his friends and mentors were still alive), phrases stuffed with bodies, savage phrases,bête (simultaneously bestial and imbecile) phrases and sexed phrases, bodies speaking phrases without incarnating them. One also sings, with our dancer’s physicality, against an electronic music that no longer needs an “agent/performer” but that ceaselessly calls for one... There are no foundations of “utopias of alliance” laid out to simplify our work. All that comes is a series of words: coverings, indistinctness, taut presences, frontal muddle, shared stage, house one third empty... I’m told this isn’t the way to convince. I only bring this all up in virtue of the law that proclaims that the simplest choices are also the most enormous. Thus this layer cake of blankets will be impossible to accomplish, too heavy, too expensive, too delicate to manipulate... These solid choices (cover-up after overexposure) will without doubt compel the dancing to the subtility of which it must be capable. Hence, we must be capable. So everything is in place to kill the young choreographer and put the reader to sleep, smother the performers, pin down Otomo Yoshihide the mad Japanese, incite doubt (silly laughter or embarrassed silence) - doubt both healthy, and (why not?) thoughtful. (...)

Boris Charmatz (extract from a letter written in january 1999).