Salves

A clearly political piece in the strongest sense of the word, ‘Salves’ is a sequence of die-hard images, flashes ripped from the darkness, that show us the perpetual madness of the world.

For her first production as director of the Centre Chorégraphique National in Rillieux-la-Pape, Maguy Marin’s ‘Salves’ was a real hit at the last Biennial. A clearly political piece in the strongest sense of the word, ‘Salves’ masterfully condenses her journey and extraordinary vision of choreographic art. This piece of milimetric chaos, with its immense rhythmic score for seven performers and long-standing members and a breathtaking onstage precision, distils a colossal amount of restrained violence. ‘Umwelt’, ‘Ha ! Ha !’, ‘Turba’, ‘Description d’un Combat’ and now ‘Salves’: Maguy Marin’s recent pieces may well be disturbing, but they are necessary for what they show and what they assert, from a present viewed as a field of ruins left behind by the great collective catastrophes of the 20th century.  

“When I began this new piece, I remembered that when we made ‘Turba’, there was something about Lucretius’ ‘De rerum natura’1 that had got us very excited: atoms are constantly deteriorating, but at some time while they are decreasing, they deviate from their course, which is called the clinamen. An atom only needs to deviate slightly from its parallel trajectory in order to collide with others, which could mean the birth of a new world, the invention of a new life form which could give way to incredible consequences. Similarly, in reference to Franz Kafka’s parable on which our last piece, ‘Description d’un Combat’, was based, Hannah Arendt wrote that man’s presence opens up a hole in the continuum of time between past and future, thus causing opposite forces to deviate very slightly from their initial direction, creating a diagonal force that resembles what physicians call a parallelogram of forces. Alluding to Walter Benjamin’s ‘loss of experience’, which arose from the repeated collective catastrophes of the 20th century which transformed that present into a field of ruins devoid of integration into history – in other words, with neither memory nor future – Georges Didi-Huberman, in his book ‘Survivance des lucioles’2
, suggests that we “elevate, in each specific situation, this decline into dignity, a new beauty, by making this very poverty into an experience following Walter Benjamin’s example, a man for whom decline did not mean disappearance.” We must “organise pessimism”, Benjamin would say. That is, work to foster these resistant diagonal forces, the source of inestimable moments which survive forgetting; these voices which, from the dawn of time, have been making contact with us. We need to work on our pessimism and our fears to escape the prevailing fear that crushes us and renders us powerless, sad and exhausted. We do this with the support of seven performers, our partners in previous productions.”

Source : Maguy Marin