Yvan Vaffan

By revisiting this piece first performed in 1984 and never again since then, I’m pursuing a slightly crazy dream of recreating one of my choreographies, alternating with a new piece, every year. I’ve always felt the need to re-experience my pieces, to turn them into a repertoire, to connect them to one another, to challenge the ephemera, to bring my work face-to-face with time.
Yvan Vaffan is a piece which, at the time, was called tribal, truculent and even theatrical. I’d like to go back to it in this same vein, whilst at the same time looking for other secret mechanisms within it, so that I can measure its ability to enter into a free dialogue with the times in which we’re living.

To do this, I’m really glad to be getting ready to look into it again, this time with performers most of whom weren’t even born when it was first performed, to reinvent it with them, to tune its rhythms in to what’s going on today. 

I believe that this is the fate of dance – there’s always this work of tireless rebirth to be done.
Jean-Claude Gallotta

The “tribe” tag with which Jean-Claude Gallotta’s dancers have long been labelled can probably be traced back to the Aventures d’Ivan Vaffan (Adventures of Ivan Vaffan), in 1984. People called them a “tribe” because there a boys and girls all pretending to be uncontrollable warriors and Amazons from who knows where in Mongolia, rigged out like barbarians, bearded, dressed in rags and paste, brandishing huge flags, although it’s more as though they’re fidgeting rather being waved in any warlike way. There was joy, ecstasy and prayer – or at least rites which seemed not too far from it – fondling, the whole thing a bit of a hodgepodge, but with an ability to soothe itself before setting off to conquer some sensual incongruity, or even a word of love.

The press wondered about the morals and rites of this strange horde whose members were spent all their time embracing enthusiastically, grappling with one another, feeling each other up, discovering each other, with all the astonishment of children. At the time there was talk of “the Gallotta body language and spirit”. The choreographer “muddies the waters of sex and redistributes caresses” noted the writer Hervé Guibert. Almost three decades on, Jean-Claude Gallotta is still pursuing his slightly crazy dream of recreating one of his first choreographies every year. “I still feel the need”, he says, “to re-experience my pieces, to turn them into a repertoire, to connect them to one another, to challenge the ephemera of which they’re made up, to bring my work face-to-face with time. So, to do this, I’m glad to be getting ready to question Yvan Vaffan again with performers most of whom weren’t even born when it was first performed, to reinvent the piece with them, to tune its rhythms in to what’s going on today”.

So he sees it as a matter of seeing how the elation of the nineteen eighties stands up in the less carefree times in which we’re living, where the flag of joy is flying at half-mast; how we can still find a way of “redistributing” not only caresses but also flags, borders, identities and intimacy. Ultimately it’s about seeing how his new tribe will tackle things when it comes to who sits where on the sofa, and the whole thing has elements of both naughtiness and anti-authoritarian enthusiasm.
Claude-Henri Buffard