2024-01-07 22:22:00
On a slag heap in the Ruhr, in the bars of Dieppe… For around thirty years, filmmakers César Vayssié and Aldo Lee have been filming the choreographer and his dancers. A retrospective is dedicated to them in Marseille.
The titles of Boris Charmatz’s choreographies are never just titles. They are sometimes onomatopoeia (Aatt enen tionon) sometimes didascalies (Dance engaged and worked by pathos), sometimes enigmas from Cluedo or absurd daydreams à la Satie. The dances themselves are never quite spectacles. These are sleeping dances (Somnole), mental dances, blind dances or dances “wasted in the grass” (named after the solo created this year with Paris Opera dancer Marion Barbeau). On this basis, you will never see simple recordings of shows serving solely to archive the work of Boris Charmatz. You will see real films with a real author behind, who is generally called César Vayssié or Aldo Lee, two filmmakers faithful to the choreographer, today in majesty in the spaces of the Frac Sud.
After the exhibition dedicated to the walking artist Hamish Fulton, before that dedicated to the theme “art and sport”, the Marseille institution presents a retrospective in six films which first projects us here, on the tiles of the café du commerce of Dieppe in 1999, where the young Boris Charmatz scratched himself repeatedly before the eyes of the customers observing him throwing his phlegm or his aberrant tone over the stools of their daily decor. It’s the Disparates, a series of mischievous skits filmed in the swimming pools, harbour, bars, beaches of the port city, thanks to a camera cleverly handling mobile bridges to negotiate its tracking shots, playing with false connections and ellipses to link together these fanciful postcards, above all shifting the imagination of urban musicals like Singing in the Rain or the Umbrellas of Cherbourg by plastering the images with a pompous peplum soundtrack, “hollywoodieppe” (we owe this pretty neologism to César Vayssié). The thirty years of collaboration between this filmmaker and Boris Charmatz form a broad spectrum, at the end of which Les Disparates undoubtedly asserts itself as the most “written” film, with a classic film crew and sophisticated editing.
At the other end is Unguided Tour, a sequence shot lasting more than an hour shot on a smartphone in exhibition spaces, unfortunately absent from this retrospective. In the middle of the range, sits in majesty the sublime Levée: flirting with the aesthetics of apocalypse films, filmed in the Ruhr on the mining site of Halde Haniel – an immense slag heap in the shape of a spiral – the film shows the dancers taken in a storm of coal waste filmed from a helicopter. This is visible at the Frac, a contemporary art venue whose approach must be saluted here: few choreographers and filmmakers have led collaborations of such magnitude (this was the case of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker with Thierry de Mey, for example) but there are also rare distribution spaces for these experimental films.
“Dances wasted in the grass”, until March 24 at the Frac Sud-Cité de l’art contemporain in Marseille (13). Information fracsud.org
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