Ribatz, Ribatz ! ou le grain du temps

It was a film experience ever attempted: to find, 25 years after its creation, forgotten choreography which only remained a few photographs in black and white, and musical fragments.

In 2001, Les Carnets Bagouet engaged in an extremely problematic undertaking: retrieving a 1976 choreography by Dominique Bagouet, as there only remain a few minutes of video, a few photographs, and the distant memory of the dancers of that time. While the project certainly aims to retrieve the dance, it also seeks to explore that mysterious and elusive field of the memory of bodies. 

After having collected all the available documents, all those who had been in contact with the piece gathered together. The film is the delicate testimony of this reunion. Certain people met for the very first time – Ribatz, Ribatz ! was shown several times but not always with the same dancers – and yet everyone shared a common experience. Waves of choreography suddenly unfurling or gestures laboriously reconstructed one by one, autisms and chattering around memory, rushes of emotion let loose with liberated gestures; words, also, on the mysterious paths of the return of gesture. Marie-Hélène Rebois focuses her gaze on the edge of the room – we never see all of it – and records the gestures of the dance and the others, the words and the looks. She reads the work in progress and, far removed from any sentimentality, lets the most moving moments of this strange human adventure come to her.

Source : Isabelle Ginot