Notre amour

“Notre amour” (2009) is a documentary by Arnold Pasquier on the creative work of Christian Rizzo’s piece, “Mon amour“, created at the Opéra de Lille on February 28th, 2008. It was shot at the CNDC d’Angers, the Chaufferie de Saint-Denis, and the Opéra de Lille – January – March 2008. 

“Arnold Pasquier films the rehearsals and performances of a show by Christian Rizzo, ”Mon amour”. Bodies that walk, embrace and embrace each other, find themselves, experiment; faces at work, beautiful, focused and laughing, painted with sequins, masked by a coloured tulle falling from their hoods ; plants in pots, smoke, black globes : a mysterious world with a series of senseless actions. Pretending to restore order, the choreographer pops up here and there, the artisan of this potential community, whose members brush against each other and seek to reunite. We hear Mark Tompkins’ song: grave like a preacher, he leads us towards the wondrous outcome, the fable, springing from the volutes. A dancer challenges someone: himself? his friends? us? It is in the hollow of solitudes that Our love alights, lulled by a whispered song, “oh my love, oh my love… “.”  

Remark by the videographer (2019) :  

“The filming followed the rehearsal schedule of Christian Rizzo’s choreographic show “Mon amour”. For three months, in three places (two studios and the theatre stage), the seven interpreters, the singer, and the musicians invented the show. I filmed everything, or almost. Dance, song, music, the stage set. All quickly brought together by the choreographer who needs to work in confrontation with all these elements. Then, by adding, taking away, shifting, the show takes shape. I quickly identify what interests me. I single out motifs that I find again day in day out. The group as a block, walking, tenderness, repeated embraces, expressions. Black balls, plants, chairs, and the table of the stage set, before the fog pours in and builds new dramatic spaces. While filming, I’m excited about the narrative dimension of the choreographic proposals. The singling out of faces and the quality of Christian Rizzo’s dance open up wide territories of fiction. I asked a writer, Julien Thèves, after showing him the group at work in Saint-Denis, to write a scene that would end the documentary. For me this was a means of “doing something” with this impression of fiction and gave me a lead for constructing the future film, enlightened by this narrative counterpoint. Julien suggested an encounter in an apartment where the arguments of choreographic material would be briefly played out. A dancer’s monologue becomes a kind of medium and makes the months of work by the team and the dream of collective creation appear as a blissful interlude. A female singer, appearing out of nowhere, interprets a cappella, seated on the edge of a sofa, like a cat, a final song that concludes the amorous journey. For the more “documentary” part, I filmed close up to the dancers, sometimes holding my camera in my hand, which allowed me proximity with the movement. Then, on foot, around the stage, at a distance and often at long focal length, to isolate and follow by panning shots the circulation of the bodies. This method, in that it isolates movement, makes it somewhat abstract, but the graphic energy given off seems to me an accurate representation of the choreographic power. This proximity is expanded by wider shots that amply show the space of the stage. It is by accumulating perspectives in the same sequence, collected day by day, that I give the idea of the choreography. The repetition of the gestures corrected and transformed gives the temporality of the work, which, while not respected chronologically, is structured by association. Along the way, we add the stage set, costumes and music, we lose make-up and accessories. 

While I was editing my film, I was no longer certain who, out of Christian Rizzo and myself, was the most “abstract” and who was the most “sentimental”. But, after all, what does it matter? Are we not like those figures walking at the start of the show, following routes that are so certain and yet so futile, along which, nevertheless, some genuine moments of happiness may emerge. It is of such fleeting flares, as certain as they are elusive, that I would like “Notre amour” to speak.