Catherine Diverrès - Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne

Catherine Diverrès works on extremes and contradictions. Seriousness and tension make her work strong and troubling, combining abstraction and theatricality.

Dancer of the ineffable and choreographer of intranquillity, Catherine Diverrès works on extremes and contradictions. For her, the quality of dance hinges on a rare awareness of time. Gravity and tension make her pieces powerful and disturbing works that combine abstraction and theatricality. 

Since she started out with Bernardo Montet, this former director of the Centre Chorégraphique de Rennes (in 2008 she founded her own company) has created her “land”: an incisive writing made of surges, desires and abandons, a conception of nothingness that gives her dance an earthy dimension. Her works, often inspired by philosophical, literary and poetic texts, are imbued with a tragic perception of existence. Fruits is a continuation of this. A work on war, it takes place on a carbonised land, where a huge gate blocks off the stage. In this deserted space, as though marked by traces of bombing, the choreographer questions the notion of territory. She exposes dance to the cruelty of the world, a mirror on which the interpreters’ bodies collide during choreographic sequences uplifted by a lyrical spirit.

Source : Irène Filiberti

This collection dedicated to contemporary French choreographers is presented as a series of encounters around a creation. These portraits, which alternate interviews and extracts from performances, propose an approach to dance through thought and the issues of the body, while making visible the link existing between reflection and representation.

In the early 1980s, a new generation of choreographers emerged on the French scene. Occupying theatres with a radically different conception of dance, they won over a public and ensured their work and ideas would last. Today, most of them direct a national choreographic centre (CCN) or a recognised company. In the course of their career or in their work processes, they all ask questions linked to the world – whether focused on the body, writing, dance components (in particular space and time) or the relationship to other artistic forms.

Angelin Preljocaj – Centre chorégraphique national d’Aix-en-Provence (1996) 

Catherine Diverrès – Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne (1996) 

Charles Cré-Ange, compagnie Cré-Ange (1997) 

Claude Brumachon – Centre chorégraphique national de Nantes (1998) 

Jean-Claude Gallotta – Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble (1996) 

Josef Nadj – Centre chorégraphique national d’Orléans (1997) 

Mathilde Monnier – Centre chorégraphique national de Montpellier (1998) 

Odile Duboc – Centre chorégraphique national de Franche-Comté (1997) 

Philippe Decouflé, compagnie DCA (1998) 

Régine Chopinot – Centre chorégraphique national de La Rochelle/Poitou-Charentes (1998)