‘There’s a moment when a child chooses a direction, as part
of growing up, and that is a step that I never managed to take. Fortunately, I
found the circus, which allowed me to remain undisciplined.’
– Yoann Bourgeois
There’s a curious contradiction in these words from the
French acrobat, choreographer and director Yoann Bourgeois. Given his
accomplishments and talents, what a lack of direction and discipline looks like
for Bourgeois is rather unique. He’s expert in using trampolines in inventive,
poetic, circus-inspired contemporary dance. He’s won numerous awards. He’s
presented his work in prestigious venues. His performances have drawn
comparisons to the slapstick skills of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Squaring his achievements and abilities with his own
description of his work becomes easier when we look at some of the recurring themes
of his choreographies. Striving, stumbling and falling feature prominently,
often to simultaneously pathos-filled and comedic effect. At the same time,
he’s fascinated by physical forces and how bodies interact with them, an
interest he calls ‘research that doesn’t have an end in itself’. If there’s no
definitive aim of this ongoing experimentation with movement, it manifests as
something magnificent: human forms that seem momentarily freed from gravity,
that fly, float and touch down in beguiling ways.
Whereas his primary productions are meant to be experienced
in person, in situ, the short film Clair de lune by the French
filmmaker Raphaël Wertheimer uses tools of cinema – camera angles that shift
perspective, editing that accentuates the music’s contours, a stark black and
white palette – to explore elements one of Bourgeois’s most celebrated
choreographies, La mécanique de
l’histoire (The Mechanics of History). Adapting that work
into a one-man performance set to Claude Debussy’s beloved composition Clair
de lune, Bourgeois draws out the theme of childhood and time. Describing
his collaboration with the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose rendition
of Clair de lune graces the film, Bourgeois says, ‘To create –
to be creative – is to draw a door on the wall, and then open the door. Clair
de lune opens this door wide to transport us to a time where time
doesn’t pass. That’s why we become children again when we listen to this
music.’
Although the film Clair de lune is an
abstracted interpretation of a childlike experience of time, Bourgeois’s idea
here perhaps resolves some of the oppositional tension in his account of his
work. In a sense, by becoming hugely adept at moving through space and
interacting with objects, he has figured out how to retain a child’s engagement
with the world, one in which stumbling and falling amount to learning, in which
repetition is about exploration, and in which just about anything – including
trying to get to the top of the stairs – can be a game.
Choreographer: Yoann Bourgeois
Director: Raphaël Wertheimer
Pianist: Alexandre Tharaud
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