He Who Falls - Program

MAR 1 - 4 , 2018 BLUMA APPEL THEATRE

he who falls celui qui tombe CO N C E IV E D, D I R EC TE D A N D S TAG E D BY

YOANN BOURGEOIS A S S I S TE D BY

Season Sponsor

THIS PERFORMANCE RUNS APPROXIMATELY 75 MINUTES, THERE IS NO INTERMISSION

MARIE FONTE P E R FO R M E D BY

DIMITRI JOURDE JULIEN CRAMILLET ELISE LEGROS JEAN-YVES PHUONG FRANCESCA ZIVIANI MARIE VAUDIN

This production is generously underwritten by SYLVIA SOYKA and an ANONYMOUS DONOR Dance Programming Supporter

This tour is generously supported by

VO I C E WO R K

CAROLINE BLANPIED MARIE FONTE JEAN-BAPTISTE VEYRET-LOGERIAS THALIA ZILIOTIS

Media Sponsors

LI G HTI N G BY

ADÈLE GRÉPINET SO U N D BY

ANTOINE GARRY COS T U M E S BY

GINETTE SIGOLÈNE PETEY TEC H N I C A L M A NAG E R

DAVID HANSE H E A D O F LI G HTI N G

MAGALI LARCHÉ H E A D O F SO U N D

BENOIT MARCHAND H E A D O F S TAG E

ETIENNE DEBRAUX

Executive Produced by CCN2-Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble — Direction Yoann Bourgeois and Rachid Ouramdane.

Co-produced by Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois - MC2: Grenoble - Biennale de la danse de Lyon - Théâtre de la Ville, Paris - Maison de la Culture de Bourges - L’hippodrome, Scène Nationale de Douai - Le Manège de Reims, Scène Nationale - Le Parvis, Scène Nationale de Tarbes Pyrénées Théâtre du Vellein - La brèche, Pôle national des arts du cirque de Basse-Normandie / Cherbourg-Octeville et Théâtre National de Bretagne - Rennes.

With the support of Adami, Spedidam.

Yoann Bourgeois is supported by Fondation BNP Paribas.

The CCN2 is financed by Drac Auvergne - RhôneAlpes/Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Grenoble-Alpes Métropole, Département de l’Isère, Région Auvergne – Rhône -Alpes and supported by Institut français for international touring.

Artistic + General Director’s Note In this world of virtual images and special effects, rare are the moments when - in the real world - we have to stop and rub our eyes, then look again.

Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing? Is that actually possible? Nature sometimes offers us that gift, and a true gift it always is. So does Yoann Bourgeois, with his poetic, choreographed metaphor about community, survival, the will to live and to love: He Who Falls.

Yoann is one of a generation of choreographers for whom the definition of dance has stretched beyond recognition. His language is less about technique and style (though his stylish dancers have impeccable technique) than it is about the story of bodies in space, the deeply-rooted narrative of how the world plays upon our bodies, as feebly or forcibly we try to play upon it.

Here the world is a raft, an impromptu vessel, a surface that both saves us and leads us astray, that gives us strength and becomes a mortal enemy, that offers refuge and that may just as easily abandon us. Here, the world is one of metamorphosis, and a kind of physical metalinguistics. Gorgeous.

Frightening. Visceral.

- MATTHEW JOCELYN

About HE WHO FALLS (Celui qui tombe) WHAT WAS THE STARTING POINT FOR THIS CREATION?

Yoann Bourgeois: With this project, I wanted to go deeper into a certain type of theatre by exaggerating a situation where there is a balance of power. I came up with stage-design of a simple platform manipulated by various mechanisms (balanced, dangled, manipulated by a centrifugal force…). Six people - a kind of mankind in miniature – are on the platform and try to remain standing. They react to the physical constraints without initiating movement themselves, and it’s from this tussle between their mass and force that the situation is born.

YOUR VISION OF THE CIRCUS IS MORE IN LINE WITH THE NOTION OF ‘NONACTION’ RATHER THAN MANIPULATION. WHAT DOES THIS ALLOW YOU TO SAY?

My intention is to refine movement by sticking to an essential principle of the circus: the performer as a vector of the forces that pass through him. He is driven and penetrated by forces that he interprets. If this is inherent to the circus, it is because the circus represents a certain aspect of humanity: that man is not the center of the universe, and by the same measure there is no reason he should be at the center of the stage. On my ideal stage (no matter if it exists or not) man co-exists on a horizontal plane beside animals and machines without domineering over them. Repositioning things in this way leaves man all the more overwhelmed.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT YOUR WORK?

We like to start off with rough sketches, some of which work straight off and become numbers in the show. After seven years of creating, something is taking shape: a constellation of small ideas gravitating towards a central theme - the suspension point. I wanted recently to give this never-ending research a name: ‘tentative approaches to the point of suspension’.

Excerpts from an interview with Yoann Bourgeois by Laurent Goumarre (commissioned by the Biennale de la Danse – Lyon)

YOANN BOURGEOIS Acrobat, actor, juggler, dancer: Yoann Bourgeois is first and foremost a Player.

Growing up in a small village in the Jura, he discovered vertigo games at the Cirque Plume, later to graduate from the Centre National Des Arts du Cirque de Châlons-en-Champagne alternating with the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers.

He researched weightlessness with Alexandre Del Perugia, and Kitsou Dubois and became a member of the Maguy Marin company at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la- Pape, where, over four years, his work centered on the theme ‘communal being’.

After revivals of May B and Umwelt and two new works, Turba in 2007 and Description d’un combat (Description of a fight) in 2009, all by choreographer Maguy Marin, he began his own creative practice in 2010. Accompanied hitherto by Marie Fonte, he founded l’Atelier du Joueur (The Player’s Workshop), a nomadic resource center for performance. This workshop, uniting artists across several disciplines, was to provide the basis of Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois.

The group settled in Grenoble, Bourgeois’ birthplace, with the intention of exploring the hidden ties between the games of mimicry and vertigo. A commission from Grenoble’s art center MC2 allowed the group access to the Vauban

belvedere, ancient fortifications perched high over the city, resulting in the site-specific work Cavale. The show played with the impressive views to giddying effect.

An initial creative cycle began with a number of large musical works focusing on the ‘figure’–a key element of classical Circus repertoire – in conjunction with the ‘motif’, allowing for a new form of writing liberated from the need to be spectacular. This resulted in 2010 in Les Fugues short dances for a man with object written for J.S Bach’s The Art of Fugue; L’Art de la Fugue in 2011, the deconstruction of a monolithic block by two performers, male and female, alongside Bach’s eponymous work, and Wu-Wei in 2012, created for the artists of the Beijing Opera and inspired by the Taoist principle of ‘non-action’. This same year the company inaugurated the C.I.R.C (Centre International de Recherches Circassiennes) with a number of trips to China aiming to establish the ancestral roots of acrobatic movement.

In 2013, a year of transition, Bourgeois launched a new program for circus academies based on a body of his own work. Convinced that performers should appropriate their own interpretations of circus writing, the project, backed by the SACD, aimed to reflect upon the conditions of circus apprenticeship with a view to establishing a true circus repertoire.

In 2014, a second body of work was to radicalize his thinking yet further.

Taking the etymology of ‘drama’ as a weaving together of actions as a starting point, and applying it to the circus, he was drawn to the dramatic possibilities of the relationship between the body and the forces acting open it. This resulted in Celui qui tombe (He Who Falls), a work for six performers

created in September 2014 for the Lyon dance biennale. In parallel, research on physical devices, allowing the individual to multiply into many subjects, resulted in the creation of Les Paroles Impossibles (Impossible speech).

Also in 2014, an invitation to perform at the Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris encouraged the creation of a new work from a ‘constellation’ of pre-existing ideas.

Minuit (Midnight) is a site specific programme written ‘in situ’ with the technical and special particularities of each host theatre in mind. Each edition of the show varies according to the artists invited to perform and the different material objects they bring with them onstage.

Geraldine Aresteanu

The idea of a circular stage, in reference to the traditional circus ‘BigTop’, is at the centre of

Bourgeois’ thinking when imagining new projects. Offering perfect site lines to the audience and allowing a non-hierarchical rapport between performers, the circle affirms the popular dimension of his work.

In 2015, he began new work on Tentative approaches to a suspension point, involving eight pieces of apparatus and a circular stage design allowing for a 360° view. These new short pieces will be added to existing works for Numéros Poèmes, a collection of eleven poetic objects. Since January 2016, he directed the CCN2-Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble with Rachid Ouramdame.

These many and varied projects express his pressing desire to embrace and experiment with life in all its forms. Yoann Bourgeois’ life is dedicated to the performing arts.