À bras le corps

In 1992, Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas, fresh out of the conservatoire, burst onto the choreographic scene with À bras-le-corps. This piece, which requires a huge expenditure of energy on the part of the body, deviated from the conventions of the time. As Dimitri Chamblas has explained, for them it was about exploring what it was possible to do ‘without a frame or masters’, and to ‘show what they had learnt how to hide’: testing limits, the edges, over-exposing the body, fatigue and breathing, and by confronting their presence with that of the audience. Spread out in a square around the dancers, the spectators see and hear everything: the beat of steps, the moments of recuperation, the bumping together, flesh brushing against flesh, the skin getting hot then glistening, then covered in droplets. The proximity enables the audience to zoom in, to het a close up of a contact, a moment of hesitation: how a hand grabs another hand, how a hand grasps a thigh, how bodies part and come back together again.

A physical, athletic creation, conceived by their young dancers’ bodies, À bras-le-corps might have stopped when Dimitri Chamblas brought his career as a performer to an end. Instead, they chose to subject their bodies to this dance of exhaustion, and to see what these gestures could still say to them, in the present. Now À bras-le-corps is entering the repertoire of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, they are entrusting this dynamic choreography to young performers who will, in turn, pit their energy and all their strength against it.