L'oubli, toucher du bois

“In my shows, I always say “I” through other persons than myself. My individuality blends into the scenic multiplicity: the dancers’ bodies and voices and also the music, the lighting, the décor… Each of my works is underpinned by an autobiographical dramaturgy, like a main theme that becomes more and more visible with time”. “L’oubli, toucher du bois” epitomizes this introspective dimension. Like a type of inquiry that Christian Rizzo takes on, starting off by emptying his mind. Objects that have survived former shows are removed one by one: goodbye to the green plant, goodbye to the black sphere, goodbye to his personal mythologies… The dancers move in a big wooden box – a mental space haunted by the fear of death. The ghosts of his memories, of those still alive, of those long-gone, of places and of times, everything that has life laid down on him and that he put back on stage, throng here. The writing of the show equates actions and observations by arranging compositions of regards, in particular seen through the eyes of this aging character played by Jean-Louis Badet, a body frozen in a silent torment. Around him, the dancers accomplish a myriad of divisions, of split personalities, becoming successively shadows of their former selves, shadows of the others. The intoxicating repetition of certain gestural patterns sways between the erratic and drumming notes of a piano that the soundtrack, composed by Sylvain Chauveau, distils. Christian Rizzo wagers on our ability to let go so that a dull emotion intensely buried deep inside of us may vibrate. His shows unfurl based on logic of sensation rather than one of signification.
Poetics of the senses rather than of sense.

COSMIC REBIRTH

This does not mean that the action is subjected to emphatic registers. The bodies entwine, support one another, raise one another up, disentwine sometimes with sensitivity, sometimes with a perfunctory roughness. Incongruous sequences, like those tango steps danced back to back, offload the gravity attached to ceremonials. The situations are put under pressure with suspense that is a touch somnambulistic. As Christian Rizzo explains: “I like to work in what Stanley Kubrick called, when he talked about the last scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “the fertile zone of ambiguity”. The sequence of the old man faced with the monolith is forever prompting a powerful fascination on my imagination”. At the end of “l’oubli, toucher du bois”, the lights of Caty Olive set out to storm the regard in a cosmic ray way. Like the promise of a rebirth.

Source : Stéphane Malfettes for the Théâtre de la Ville