À quoi tu penses ? [Entretien]

Interview conducted by Claire Rousier.
Recorded at the CND 14 February 2005

About “À quoi tu penses ?” [What are you thinking about?] / creation 2003

In this extract Dominique Boivin talks about his collaboration with writer Marie Nimier on the piece “À quoi tu penses?” (What are you thinking about?).
This interview was recorded at the CND (Centre national de la danse) in Pantin in 2005.

Updating: December 2010

[What are you thinking about ?]
Going beyond a simple dialogue between dance and literature, “À quoi tu penses ?” is a veritable co-creation. Dominique Boivin and Marie Nimier worked hand in hand, mingling their worlds and investigations. What goes on in a dancer’s head on stage or during rehearsals? By what internal process does one become a dancer? Where does the desire to dance spring from? What stories do the gestures tell, if they are not silencing them? Both exposed and concealed, the dancer’s presence is a living enigma which author Marie Nimier sets out to probe here. In order to write the texts that make up the performance, she had lengthy discussions with the company’s dancers, leaving their accounts, their voices and their movements to resonate within her. A number of fictional accounts emerged. Dominique Boivin, in turn, immersed himself in Marie Nimier’s texts until he knew them intimately. There was a period of improvisation, selection and rough drafts based on the texts, working in close collaboration with the dancers, before the choreography took its final form. In short, the piece is the result of combining the twin viewpoints of writer and choreographer. Together, they kept a close eye on the rehearsals.
Born out of the metabolism of writing by dance and vice versa, “A quoi tu penses ?” turns the dancers’ presence inside out like a glove. Marie Nimier’s texts, carried either by the voices of actors on stage or by voices off, act as sound close-ups of the dancers’ internal lives: we hear what they are thinking. And what they think becomes embodied. Furthermore, Boivin describes the dances which weave the choreography as “thoughts”. Each one describes a different “way of being” in the world, a particular way of moving among others.
The meaning of the words collides or colludes with the movements. The presence of the dancers splits, separates and sometimes reforms. In the interplay between interior voice and body, the identity appears rich and complex, open to otherness and time.
Annie Suquet
Updating: December 2010