Trois Générations

Dramatists point of view
The essence and charm of a gesture is its volatility. Repeated a thousand times, a thousand times it vanishes. The original, the initial gesture, the one with which a dancer cuts through the air for the first time, is not recorded. Nowhere. It does not exist. A photo, a video, a method of transcription are only traces. Speculation is prohibited. Then the dance starts again, with the same gestures, with others, and we do not really know whether it is seeking to trick what is ephemeral or to keep it alive. While it persistently takes its apotheosis from this fragility, perhaps it is, at the same time, frantically, creating its little “enterprise for the building of duration”.
Sometimes, in the recesses of his choreographies, Jean-Claude Gallotta has sought answers to this question: how to give another chance to a danced gesture? How to give it posterity? This is why he makes it pass through different bodies, in the hope of making it pass through time, opening, for instance, one of his ballets (Lessurvivants or The survivors) with a surge of pink children like bathers, another (Solo d’Yves P) with an old lady taking on her knees an old child in shorts with braces, and yet another, the most recent (99 duos) with people of all types who wanted, for an instant, to pass on the gesture.
Each time it is question of discovering, with the help of bodies other than those that the norm approves, the substance of the gesture, what endures in it when the bodies that produce it are not the same; what it becomes when passing from a supple body to a tired body, from a worn body to a new body, from a body made for it to a body that did not expect it; what tiredness adds to it or removes from it, what technique hides in it and reveals in it.
With Trois générations or Three generations, Jean-Claude Gallotta makes these questions into an entire production. The same gestures will be questioned three times in it and they must not lie. Just as we would walk round a sculpture to know it from different angles, so the choreographer will measure up the successive times of the body to understand what remains of the “acting” body under the repeated gesture and what part of the gesture is perpetuated by the difference in bodies. We will look at these same gestures in the light of three ages: bodies starting out, trained bodies, bodies modelled by other pursuits. What mutations, what transformations will the movement undergo? Will it change in nature? Will we recognise it? Will we still call it by its name?
For, of course, the transport of the gesture from one age to another is not without re-appropriations. The gesture will be remodelled, metabolised even by its transit. Each age will be a new tradduttore, a new traditore. It is that “betrayal” that Jean-Claude Gallotta wishes to propose today in the dance presentation. The betrayal that we will also, of course, call, transmission. The choreographer just like the director of a theatre (re)presentation.
Claude-Henri Buffard – November 2002