Racheter la mort des gestes : Chroniques chorégraphiques 1

After l’Homme à tête de chou, Daphnis é Chloé and le Sacre du printemps, Jean-Claude Gallotta and son Emile Dubois Group rediscover a taste for the “dance column”, a genre invented in 2008 and presented in an initial version in their rehearsal studio. Entitled Racheter la mort des gestes (a tribute to an article by the journalist and writer Hervé Guibert), these columns are the freest possible way of being on stage, an encounter between some who dance, some who have danced, some who would like to and some who may never dance. They come on stage and think together or in turn to see what happens. They’re not alone, there are some who dare and others who gossip, even in duos.
This is a succession of sequences – often short – which, put together, attempt to describe the state of the world, or at least of the world that we can modestly see through the studio windows or a few portholes; of what we understand of the world, through our movements, words and music. They’re extracts from our logbooks and travel diaries, our reactions – sometimes immediate – to the latest events. With Jean-Claude Gallotta in charge of the scratching and the turntables, this is the Little Reactive Sequences Cabaret.
These “dance columns” sometimes tell any old story, others are about almost nothing; they sometimes try to tell us more, and sometimes they don’t succeed. With moments of daring, incongruity, rarity, courage, questioning and memory that produce the political, the moving, the not too sad, the incorrect and the very serious.
At the start of this second decade, Jean-Claude Gallotta’s dance seems to be determined to burn its wings in the fires of its memory and those of the times. Racheter la mort des gestes is a sort of choreographic X-ray – inevitably a little blurred – in which we try to look through the opaque clutter of images and words that separates us from reality and glimpse a few movements that tell us that life – reassuring and strong – is still there.