Les Aventures d'Ivan Vaffan

“Who is Ivan Vaffan? Is that a made-up name?”
Yes, it’s a made-up name. Choreography gives us such freedom that we don’t know what a piece will turn out to be. At the same time, I don’t want to work without a title. Somebody brought to my attention that I often take proper names as titles, like Yves P., Ulysses, Daphnis and Chloe. A name, a being, lets us have all the possibilities and all the contradictions. The first image is that of a being, with all that he has been able to do, with his most philosophical and most narrative adventures, his innermost and his most extroverted ones. I had fun writing things about Ivan Vaffan. It was somewhere between an aphorism and a philosophical tale, with a hint of Zarathustra. I did not use these notes when I was setting this choreography. However, what remains important is the journey, all the different echoes, from the banal to the sacred, which can be created with a name as a starting point. While avoiding, of course, mime and drama. Not drama in the broad sense of the term, but drama as an medium to aid conventional actions.

The second part of the piece is called “The White Studio” and is organised around two barres positioned diagonally on the stage. Did you deliberately want to present a reflection of the cubic space created by the stage?
Not at all – I simply wanted to imagine two barres and to make sure that the audience could always see the dancers, even when they are in single file. My starting point was the idea of the dance studio as a type of melting pot to which we can always return when we are in search of inspiration. After the first act, which is very strong in the physical sense of the word, it was necessary to take stock and start again from something primary: the dancer’s starting point, the studio. This, however, is perhaps something which I am discovering with hindsight (…).”
From an interview by Alain Philippon from the French daily Le Monde