O.C.C.C.

“O.C.C.C.” [Oh! Yes, yes, yes!] (pronounced Oh! Si, si, si!) is the last section of the Fin des Temps (End of Time) trilogy begun by Régine Chopinot with “Chair-Obscur” and the erasure of the past in 2002 and followed by “WHA” and the disappearance of the future in 2004 on the following theme: “What remains to be danced?”. For the choreographer, this does not represent a closure as much as a marking of time “present in which it had opened” and “an exposure of the dance itself” (interview with Régine Chopinot, in L’Humanité, 20 March, 2006). Régine Chopinot would say that this was her “most Bagouetian” piece, in reference to the choreographer Dominique Bagouet who died in 1992 (programme from the Montpellier Danse Festival, July 2007). She put in it everything she could ever have learned: “an account of what has motivated me since 1978: the taste of the difference of 1985’s “Défilé” (The fashion show), the energy of “Appel d’air” (In-draught) in 1981, and the relationship which I always have had with the stage and my work with the company” (programme from the Montpellier Danse Festival, July 2007). She draws up a sort of inventory of the years she spent as director of the CCN La Rochelle, instilling it with some reinvention. According to Annie Suquet, this piece also returns to “the impossibility of plenitude (of the being, of the direction…)”, which can be linked to the analyses of Andre Lepecki on the origins of the dance on stage in the West (cf. Annie Suquet, “Chopinot”, Le Mans: Cénomane, 2010, p.103-104 and André Lepecki, “Exhausting dance. Performance and the politics of movement”, New York: Routledge, 2006).

That begins with the end, with the darkness and the dancers coming to greet the audience. Set design and the lighting accentuate this dominant darkness, thanks to a wall of light produced by Maryse Gautier, in front of which the dancers move in against the light, as if in a scene from a film. In the darkness, alternating with the solos, the bodies move in parallel, following diagonals or lines, and handle objects painted in black (bags, tiles, javelins and other elements of decoration, which brings to mind previous shows by BARC), as if in a building kit. The soundtrack, put together by DJ U-Zul, is strident rock’n’roll music, metal-like, which alternates with the sounds of ululating women. Very visual – the set designer Jean Michel Bruyère is here again – this piece resembles a shadow theatre, a puppet show or a ballet of monochrome ghosts.

““O.C.C.C.” is concerned with “the time that remains”, even at the end of time: the present. “O.C.C.C.” is what remains to be done, what can be still done, in the place the performance is happening and while you hold, tight and fast, onto a last piece of time which, far from progressing, from passing, of happening there, is reduced permanently, by the before and the after. […] The title O.C.C.C is not serious but it allows the expression of something which I always refused to do: to say yes. It offers me a certain detachment and the power to accept the things in me which are beyond me.”

(Programme from the Chapelle Fromentin, La Rochelle, March 2006)

Press quotes

“With OCCC, Régine Chopinot delivers an inventive sketch which summarises twenty years spent at the head of the Centre chorégraphique national Poitou-Charentes (Poitou-Charentes National Choreography Centre) in La Rochelle. […] She thus delivers a sketch of the time that remains, a sort of inventory and assessment of what gives her work such contrasting faces and ends up creating a style: the energy, the connection, the differences, the gaze…”

Isabelle Danto, Le Figaro, 13 March, 2006

“With OCCC, Régine Chopinot examines dance from all sides of the editing table.  She observes it with the magnifying glass in order to better x-ray the present time.”

Muriel Steinmetz, L’Humanité, 20 March 2006

Hervé Gauville, “Millimaitre”, Libération, 17 March, 2006

Updating: February 2013