Le Rêve d'Helen Keller

This work for 4 performers, which won first prize at the Concours chorégraphique international de Bagnolet in 1984, evokes the figure of Helen Keller by drawing her inspiration from “La forme du rêve” (Dream Form), a novel by the Japanese writer H. Yukata

In this work for 4 performers presented in 1984 at the Concours chorégraphique international de Bagnolet (Bagnolet International Choreographic Contest), where it won first prize as well as the French Ministry of Culture award, Catherine Diverrès evokes the figure of Helen Adams Keller – the blind, deaf and dumb American lecturer and political activist – by drawing her inspiration from “La forme du rêve” (Dream Form), a novel by the Japanese writer Hanya Yukata. This dream imagined by the writer Hanya Yukata is described as “a tactile dream deprived of tactile perceptions (…) which has to blot out all external elements and allows only to see something indubitably come spontaneously into being from the sole World of Darkness” [1]

As the introduction to her presentation for the Châteauvallon Festival, the choreographer announced her project, which was highly-remote from any type of portrait, in the following words: “We will remain in this sort of dream consciousness that persists in our wakeful and daytime consciousness: in this place where light and day, waking and sleeping are shared; at the point of masculine-feminine ambiguity, at the social reference point. The question of limitation is asked. Physical and visual exasperation touches this state of no-limit, of immoderation, a feeling of fragility contained in things”. [2]

In this work, blindness is alluded to through physical suggestion: “Here, there is no game with any whatsoever imaginary or real sign language, but work on the various dimensions of darkness, of perception, of the intelligence of touch” [3] writes Irène Filiberti. And, equating this work research which can be seen in her other creations, she adds: “Just like bodily states are pursued, where their paradoxical potential – fever, waking, hypnosis, somnambulism – plays a role in the atmosphere of the creations”.

The critic Laurence Louppe qualifies “Le Rêve d’Helen Keller” as a project that is “radical and absolutely unusual” and continues:“Montet-Diverrès shared the blindness of the pure body with us. They managed to appear, difficult to do, in a spaceless, imageless world. Experience veering on the impossible. Yet, through this paradox, they took us back to the very roots of an elusive impulse, which perhaps is known as dance. Having reached this extreme point where the danced purpose could have absorbed itself in the invisible, “Le Rêve” still led to a highly-important spectacular figure: the lines stated the muffled quelling of silence and the obscure, reinvented the writing of the unseen, where body and unconsciousness explored their own periphery” [4] 

[1] C. Diverrès in “Var République Matin: Ve Festival de Châteauvallon danse”, 12-25 July 1984.
[2] C. Diverrès in “Var République Matin: Ve Festival de Châteauvallon danse”, 12-25 July 1984.
[3] I. Filiberti, “Catherine Diverrès, mémoires passantes”, Pantin, Paris: Centre national de la danse, L’Oeil d’or, 2010, p. 52.
[4] Laurence Louppe, ““Lie”-tinéraire de Catherine Diverrès”, Pour la danse, n° 119, November 1985, p. 18-19.

Claire Delcroix, March 2016