Questcequetudeviens ?

“Qu’est-ce que tu deviens ?”, like the English, “What’s up?”, is a question as banal as it is terrifying; it asks what you have become. It says that time has passed and that changes have occurred.

“Qu’est-ce que tu deviens ?”, like the English, “What’s up?”, is a question as banal as it is terrifying; it asks what you have become. It says that time has passed and that changes have occurred. It questions the choices made, and demands an on-the-spot assessment. It freezes the process of becoming, which is by nature in motion. It shows interest in the person asked, and even love, yet it can also be a sign of disinterest or disenchantment. It is a warning signal, a sting. There is despair in the way it asks, “What have you become?”, yet hope is what drives evolution. It forces us to look at the known realm behind us, while the process of becoming propels us into the future, into the unknown.

The meeting

I met Stéphanie Fuster in Toulouse, before she left for Seville to immerse herself completely in flamenco. I was touched by her special sensitivity, her amazing personality, the radical nature of her choice: to abandon everything in order to devote herself to it completely. She stayed there for eight years learning to be a répétitrice, then a dancer with the greatest names in dancing. She came back with her dance and asked me to write a show for her. I first thought that that was out of keeping with the areas of my work, which is mainly geared to the question of space. Then I changed my mind. There was of course a divergence. But that divergence was also present in her career; she who had decided to confront an art belonging to another culture, who had the status of an intruder in a symbolic discipline. I gradually realized that it was her portrait I wanted to do. A stage portrait. To imagine the space on stage which is that of her career in other climes, and to imagine her dancing, which is that of her inner, emotional range. Flamenco is there, certainly, with José Sanchez on the guitar and Alberto Garcia singing, but in a different context, that of a woman in search of herself, who is emancipated, who lives and who dies.

Source : Cie 111