Mammame [1998]

Dramatist point of view
Sometimes, among contemporary choreographies, of which many may appear to be modern mysteries inaccessible to reason and laymen, a piece of great obviousness is born. MAMMAME is such a piece, or rather has become one after being perceived as a dancing object not identifiable with creation in 1985.
Beneath its cabalistic title and despite it MAMMAME is, in fact, a fiery venture seeking elucidation. Of what? How? In what it proclaims on the stage through each movement, each burst, each shock – the necessary integrity of the body. Without words, it replies to the world, in almost a militant way, that the human body is one and indivisible, that it is a divine machine of blood, sweat, skin and soul. And suddenly, of course, in this time of unbearable events, the message takes on its true strength. A buffoon makes, for us, this terrible observation that the obvious has  become today a utopia.
MAMMAME is, undeniably, to be classed in “pieces of life”. But is it only a succession of harmoniously placed bursts or is it a story? “In dance, said the choreographer, some of us enjoy telling stories whereas others not at all.” We can therefore ask ourselves whether his quest is not leading him to try and make choreographic works with two faces, you could say cubist, that make it possible, depending on the standpoint of the spectator, depending on the meanders of his mind, to see simultaneously on the scene an abstraction, a narration, an abstraction, a narration, in the same way as, by playing with a hologram, you can see two aspects of a same image.
MAMMAME appears to enable this approach. Through the history of the “MAMMAME” tribe it is possible to tell (oneself) a story. Jean-Claude Gallotta does it. “MAMMAME, a garrison town in the Arkadine desert, on the 20th June of a leap year. The dance opens with the fall of a man.” A kind of endangered species the “MAMMAMES” dance the Cabscholle…
But those who prefer games of the body and abstraction, sound and meaning, will firstly see in the word “MAMMAME” a sort of 12-legged phonetic caterpillar. This crawling, unending word (mammamemammamemammame…) recalls that any dance takes its source in the ground. As for all caterpillars, we look for the head and tail, “MAMMAME” is a palindrome whose name we chew rather than pronounce.
Thus relieved of the burden of carrying a meaning, this succession of letters can be understood as a simple onomatopoeia which recalls that the mouth, the lips, the vocal chords, the larynx, right through to the sounds that come out, are also to be choreographed. Even prevented from giving access to the least evocation, the title “MAMMAME” says the dance. Pronounce it, and already something in you starts to dance. Chew it and you outline with your lips something similar to a choreographic movement. By giving the spectator this title to put in his mouth the choreographer does not give him a key but offers him the body and soul of the production. “MAMMAME” is a choreographed dance to be eaten.
It thus belongs to an art of regeneration, that is to say that intends humbly to help reconstitute in us the human part that our guilty indifference to the world devitalises each day a little more.
Claude-Henri Buffard – January 1998