Memories (ou l'oubli)

Don’t lose your memory, but accept forgetting.

Both an artistic object and a research tool, Memories (or oblivion) combines the use of different archive materials, the textual and sound proposals of nearly 50 contributors, and the outside viewpoints of artists and writers, exploring the repertoire and memory of the choreographic gesture as much as the changing status and future desires of five generations of dancers.

Through the individual and collective itineraries of the choreographer and his dancers, the project is a pretext for retracing the history of French contemporary dance since the 1980s; a testimony to the journey of an entire profession.

Remembrance (1987-2017)

A documentary series

A choreographer renowned for his attachment to video as a sensitive approach to choreography, Hervé Robbe’s Memories (or forgetting) project offers us a new audiovisual object somewhere between documentary and fiction, archive and creation.

This dance film is an opportunity to bring together the wonderful dancers who have accompanied me on my artistic adventure. Five generations of artists who have embodied with virtuosity all these dances that have never stopped reinventing themselves. With the help of a whole team, I’m going to question and revisit these works, their subjects and their natures, in order to write a new script. A film that documents the memories of dancers and questions them about the traces of their past dances. A new archive, the archive of bodies, an accumulation of short fictions filmed in close-up. A rewind that plays with erasure and disappearance, the blurred contours of our memories, to reveal the ghosts of our memory.

A new landscape

A piece for ten dancers

A new dance that unfolds here on the stage and draws a new landscape for the bodies in a friction with reality, like an offering to the audience embracing its future. A dance that doesn’t turn its back on its past, that emanates from a chamber of echoes and reminiscences and allows another collective ritual to emerge, a new address.

Thirty years of creation, I remember and then I forget out of necessity to be and become…

The complex weave of our heritages and memories unfolds a long chain of transmission that, in repeated cycles, challenges us and conditions our actions. We make inexorable and constant use of the imprecision of memory and its subjectivity to reinvent ourselves in the present and imagine multiple possible fictions of our existence. So there would be no spontaneous generation of acts and constructions, just mystification and the illusion of detachment from our past. A kind of lie, a partial loss of memory necessary to avoid the intangible reproduction of things.
There’s no melancholy or nostalgia here, just a hint of recycling of archives, a kind of sustainable development of gestures still being shared.

Credits

Conception Hervé Robbe

Images Vincent Bosc