Boris Charmatz / César Vayssié
16 Aug - 24 Sep 2014
Levée – Musée de la danse
Film installation in Museum Folkwang
Levée is like a labyrinth, based on 25 simultaneous gestures that are impossible to capture in a single look. Instead of trying to capture something of this experience using a camera, the film refuses all classification and oscillates between art, documentary, and dance film. Inspired by the cratered landscape of Halde Haniel, choreographer Boris Charmatz and filmmaker César Vayssié decided to create a film based on Ruhrtriennale ́s the last year’s performance Levée des conflits.
Levée tosses dance onto unfamiliar terrain, in a no man’s land between science fiction and anthropology. Like refugees in the midst of an unreal landscape, the dancers are devoured by an entropic maelstrom, an accelerator of sensation: as if seen through a magnifying glass, exhaustion, repetition, and the bitter struggle among the dancers culminates in a chaotic knot of bodies. The camera makes its way through the dense dust, until the center of the crowd, where it encounters fragments of a strange ceremony that only seems to have the purpose of enclosing shapes and forces. What do we see? Is it a ritual, a flash mob, a group of miners, or a fleeting monument that can only be seen from the sky? The camera disappears in chaos, to then make the events visible from a vantage point: it leaps from sweat to structure, providing us with a vague notion of the organic and mathematical machine that Boris Charmatz has created.
Artistic Direction — Boris Charmatz
Realisation — César Vayssié
A production by Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne in coproduction with Same Art. Presented by Ruhrtriennale in cooperation with Museum Folkwang.
(www.ruhrtriennale.de)
Film installation in Museum Folkwang
Levée is like a labyrinth, based on 25 simultaneous gestures that are impossible to capture in a single look. Instead of trying to capture something of this experience using a camera, the film refuses all classification and oscillates between art, documentary, and dance film. Inspired by the cratered landscape of Halde Haniel, choreographer Boris Charmatz and filmmaker César Vayssié decided to create a film based on Ruhrtriennale ́s the last year’s performance Levée des conflits.
Levée tosses dance onto unfamiliar terrain, in a no man’s land between science fiction and anthropology. Like refugees in the midst of an unreal landscape, the dancers are devoured by an entropic maelstrom, an accelerator of sensation: as if seen through a magnifying glass, exhaustion, repetition, and the bitter struggle among the dancers culminates in a chaotic knot of bodies. The camera makes its way through the dense dust, until the center of the crowd, where it encounters fragments of a strange ceremony that only seems to have the purpose of enclosing shapes and forces. What do we see? Is it a ritual, a flash mob, a group of miners, or a fleeting monument that can only be seen from the sky? The camera disappears in chaos, to then make the events visible from a vantage point: it leaps from sweat to structure, providing us with a vague notion of the organic and mathematical machine that Boris Charmatz has created.
Artistic Direction — Boris Charmatz
Realisation — César Vayssié
A production by Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne in coproduction with Same Art. Presented by Ruhrtriennale in cooperation with Museum Folkwang.
(www.ruhrtriennale.de)