What is left for us — Backstage

Extracts from the creation residency of the piece What is Left for us, initially created by the choreographer Jérémy Tran for the ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Originally scheduled from June 06 to 14, 2020 by the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the piece was canceled following the Coronavirus COVID-19 crisis.

The comfortable and sophisticated daily life of beautiful people in a beautiful place is suddenly destroyed by an event, completely unforeseen. In the ruins of their memory palace, the survivors of this wreck are adrift, in the shadows, until a new hope swells and makes them rise.

Behind the title of Jérémy Tran’s dance piece for Geneva lies a question, well known to the city where disasters are dealt with and humanitarian action is taken: what is left for us, after the traumas of capitulation, revolution, genocide or diaspora? Where will our drama end? In the memories of a paradise lost, religiously guarded in exile, or gathering dust on the derelict shelves of the memory palace?

Jérémy Tran’s has an unconventional relationship with dance. His filmmaker’s eye imagines a work in multiples, seamless. Bodies that move, finely wrought music, images that come alive, living pictures thatdelve deeply into the viewer’s unconscious. “I was never very interested in just doing dance.”

Jérémy Tran speaks of his inspiration in Tanztheater, from Pina Bausch to Peeping Tom. He raves about Cyril Teste’s adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg’s screenplays for the stage. He’s spent two months as an assistant to the master, Robert Wilson. The dance he imagines is made of large groups and lines. The 25 year old Frenchman expresses his “insolent desire to take risks” but knows the humility that comes with a collective effort: Sandrine Maisonneuve assists him with dance, Deborah Erin Parini with costume, Bruno de Lavenère is on sets, David Debrinayon lights and Valentin Hadjadj fills the memory palace with music.

Jérémy Tran speaks in images. Living images like Caravaggio’s torches on the Mount of Olives that turn Judas’ kiss into an explosion, scattering the apostles into darkness and denial. Dying images, like Gericault’smacabre pyramid of half-eaten, half-living flesh drifting into the blood-less sunset of uncertain hope. Images between two worlds, like the light breaking from Caspar David Friedrich’s wooden shutter that a young woman, seen from behind, has just pushed open.

What is left for us? The far-fetched but true lineage of Johann Paul von Westhoff, a virtuoso violinist from Sweden, who was heard by a youngJ.S. Bach in Weimar and never forgotten. The path that took Bach, fiftyyears later, to the court chapel in Dresden (where Von Westhoff had also served), bearing a B-Minor Mass in his hands.

What is left after the doubting and the searching in the dark? After the night of agony and the raft of the Medusa? Just a young woman’s hand, to let the light in. This is what Jérémy Tran proposes: a body begotten of the duty to remember and the need to forget, a universal act of memory, as eternal as hope or as evanescent as ecstasy.