Le genou de mathilde [Portrait de Jean-Claude Gallotta]

This documentary, linked to the piece Des Gens qui dansent, follows the work of the choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta, in rehearsal with his dancers. Through interviews, he gives his point of view of his pieces. He mentions memories of his family life and of his journey to Africa, which has a special place in his heart.

Des gens qui dansent is the third episode in a trilogy that started in 2002 with 99 duos and continued in 2004 with Trois Générations. A mother and her daughter, an old, dying writer, a man who came out of nowhere, a Little Red Riding Hood, some wolves, a couple on a bridge, a dancer in high heels, two merry baritones, two lovers from somewhere else, and others.  This show brings together on stage a group of ten dancers of different ages who intertwine in passionate twos, tender threes and unusual fours. This is a way of Jean-Claude Gallotta wishing us to be loved madly. Figures who evoke, between friction and fiction, stories such as our own, or glimpsed in the lives of others. He uses ever fewer devices on stage.  The characters who appear, use the same name as off stage: Béatrice, Camille, Françoise, Ximena, Mathilde and Benjamin, Christophe, Darrell, Martin, and Thierry. Perhaps they even wear the same clothes. One thing is for sure, they experience the same joy and the same anguish, and the same energy and the same poetry. Des Gens qui dansent is a flowing transposition of life onto the stage. At times the difference is so slight; Jean-Claude Gallotta sets out to introduce so little “machinery” into his show that it might initially be thought that, on stage, he wanted more to arrange from life rather than to choreograph it. Whereas, of course, the choreography that he does offer, although it appears to be lifelike, if at this stage it is life, is simply set free from the mask of the spectacular. It presents itself here without manipulation, without wrapping, and without subterfuge. For the spectacular has today changed sides; it has left the theatre and spilled over outside, where it now dresses up and disguises what is real. Consequently, the stage has to repopulate itself otherwise, with people. Better still, with beings. Of course, most of these beings on stage in Des Gens qui dansent are dancers, great dancers. However, they are not there to parade their virtuosity, nor their muscles or flesh.  What they have to bare are primarily the relationships that men and women foster with each other and with the world, whose dismantling, turmoil and fragmentation this show does not imitate identically. On the other hand, the stage of Des Gens qui dansent is obviously crossed by their fracture lines. And it is precisely there, on that narrow wire, on those scars, balanced, that there is something to dance about and think perhaps a little about, if that is possible, with all our might.

Claude-Henri Buffard