Young people, old voices

Twelve dancers around twenty years of age, amateur or professional, facing Raimund Hogue, who speaks to them, watches them, accompanies them; by way of musical counterpoint, voices from the past, those of Jacques Brel, Bette Davis, Léo Ferré and Dean Martin, whose emotion haunts this variation on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. “Young People, Old Voices” is a minimalist piece, abstract and finely-honed, where formal research is reinforced by an engagement with history, which explores the collective memory, prompted by popular songs. It is also a political engagement which rejects the aesthetically-standardised body, preferring it without artifice. Whether plunged into water or aligned, pressed up against one another, whether allied or divided, the bodies produce their own language, which is up to each member of the audience to interpret.
“The subjects that inspire me are the reality which surrounds me, the age in which I live, my memory of history, people, images, sensations, the power and beauty of music as well as confrontation with the body – which, in my case, does not correspond to conventional ideals of beauty. Seeing bodies on stage which depart from the norm is important – not only from the historical point of view, but also from the perspective of the current trend which tends to reduce the status of mankind to that of artefacts or designer objects.”   

After writing for the German weekly Die Zeit for some years, Raimund Hoghe was Pina Bausch’s dramatist at Tanztheatre Wuppertal from 1980 to 1990. In 1989 he began writing his own pieces and, from 1994, took part on stage as an actor in his own works.

Source: Festival d’Automne à Paris