The Stranger [Teaser]

The Stranger : Choreography by Jean-Claude Gallotta, based on the novel by Albert Camus. A trio created in 2015 at MC2 : Grenoble.

My mother died today. She too lived in Algeria when she was a young woman and she may perhaps have been happy there. With The Stranger, like Meursault I find myself immersed in the same incomprehensible, unbearable reality and the same need to describe these absurd feelings. J.-C.G.

“Do you dance ?”, the singer Juliette Gréco asked him in a nightclub in Saint-Germain-des-Prés one evening in 1945. Yes, he danced. As later on he danced – albeit to a different rhythm – with a Swedish student at the ball held to mark the closing of the ceremony at which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1957. Albert Camus was aware of a whole people emerging from war and became one of the leaders of his generation – disconcerting quite a few people along the way, as he was not the pure spirit that his most ardent supporters might have wanted him to be. He was a child of the sea, the light and the sun, for whom sensuality was a source of happiness, an antidote to absurdity, the feeling which “is born out of the clash between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world”.
Jean-Claude Gallotta’s stage and Camus’s page are two beaches which stir under a single light ; the choreography and the novel can then move on together to the rhythm of the clash between the instincts for life and for death. The choreographer will echo the writer’s “blank writing” with a form of dance which might also – from the very beginning – have been called “blank” in that it managed to invent a genre from which all stylistic ornamentation has been stripped.
Contemporary dance and literature enjoy talking to one another. They have found mysterious points of contact over time, in an attempt to say what cannot be said, to face up to this wound which René Char used to say was the closest to the sun – lucidity. C.-H. B.