Les garagistes

Régine Chopinot created “Les Garagistes” [The Mechanics] in September 2005 for the Dampf Festival in Cologne. Described as a “solo for three” by the choreographer, the piece brings together Régine Chopinot, the musician Gianni-Grégory Fornet and the lighting specialist Maryse Gautier, who engage in a process of the thorough review of choreographic mechanisms.

For 50 minutes, on a stage adorned only with the lights of Maryse Gautier and of a bank of projectors, the three actors work with the elements that make up the performance: G.-G. Fornet plays keyboard, guitar, sometimes saturating the volume and playing with its loops, while Régine Chopinot strips down gestures and movement, freeing them. With what is not exactly a complete absence of choreographic devices, rather a dismantling of them, the three protagonists perform laboratory work, relayed by the sound work of Nicolas Barillot. In line with “Trans(e)” (2000), it is the listening which constitutes the keystone of the work being developed here; it is through listening that the energy released by the actors circulates from one to the other.

As Régine Chopinot will recognise, the austere nature of this piece demands an acuity of perception from the spectators that is often badly understood. She returns to the source here, strips down gesture and movement to rediscover its simplicity and prepares a new skin that related to her imminent departure from the Centre chorégraphique de La Rochelle (La Rochelle Choreography Centre). The essence of the choreographic luggage that she prepares to carry and work with is what she presents on stage. In December 2007, she put forward a new version of the piece entitled “Garage”, which she also presented as the evocation of a mental place where she would have stored elements of her work in order to be better able to detach herself from it and to reinvent herself.

Programme extract

“Les Garagistes” is a piece that pushes, like couch grass, through the cracks of our collective time, when the Chapelle Fromentin remains empty; public holidays, weekends… The fabrication of “large” pieces: “WHA”, “O.C.C.C” is a fragmented series of unforeseeable acts, of life moreover, appearing in the hollows of a time too large to remain smooth but too intense not to always remain tense. “Les Garagistes” is a small research department where choreographic mechanics are completely dismantled, it is the laboratory where new materials are tested and then exploited by the dancers of the company. “Les Garagistes” are the freest discoveries. They are also recreations, always new, of the origins of my work. It is an anabasis.  […]  We are four garages in total: Maryse Gautier is looking for the light, its dynamism, its quality, its density, Gianni Fornet, the music. He recycles it, he recovers it, throws it. He sorts it. Nicolas Barillot guides the sounds, their colours, sources, amplifications. And me, I look for the various supports and the successive conditions of the expression of some of the simplest physical and mental gestures. I discover how I remember and how I invent. I discover how to forget, I recreate.”

R. Chopinot, quoted in the Centre Pompidou’s programme, March 2007

Press quotes

« Régine Chopinot continue donc d’inciter au réveil contre toutes les formes d’assoupissement à l’œuvre ici et là dans le champ social. Les Garagistes prolonge, à sa manière, cet état de vigilance à l’échelle de l’intime. Les trois auteurs de la pièces sont de véritables ouvriers de la scène, même si Maryse Gautier (lumières) reste dans l’ombre. (…) On sent que Régine Chopinot cherche en elle des résonances, tandis que le musicien, sans la quitter de l’œil, pince ses cordes et que des carrés lumineux s’éteignent comme on ferme une paupière. Le corps écoute, la musique regarde, la lumière parle.

“Régine Chopinot therefore continues to discourage all forms of apathy found almost everywhere in society. “Les Garagistes” prolongs, in its own way, this state of vigilance on a personal scale. The three authors of the piece are all real stage technicians, even if Maryse Gautier (lights) remains in the shade. (…) One feels that Régine Chopinot seeks in it resonances, while the musician, without letting her out of his sight, strums the strings of his instrument and that luminous squares are extinguished in the way one closes one’s eyelids. The body listens, the music watches, the light speaks. “Les Garagistes” cultivates rapid fire humour, using Kung Fu film extracts with tearful heroines, their desperate hearts illustrated by two hands beating like wings, accompanied by the Asian strains of the guitar. The dancer lies on her back on the floor, under the bituminous crossfires of the projectors, perched high above the stage.  “Les Garagistes”, with its reduced manpower, is no meagre performance however.  With few means, a minimum of effects but a great deal of savoir-faire, live-show at all levels, the artist makes a success of an unconventional work, with variable geometry that changes from performance to performance. Here, nothing is fixed; everything is invented in an endless motivity. Chopinot, in whatever field, is never conservative.”

Muriel Steinmetz, L’Humanité, 22 November 2005

Updating: February 2013