Each body and every being is potentially capable of becoming the driving force behind an explosion that can change the face of the universe as it transforms and shatters the physical, social and cultural ties which holds them in an established convention or locked prison; bodies can then fly away and cut themselves free from laws, even those of gravity.
Laurent Busine (Honorary director of the MAC’s – Grand Hornu)
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The starting point of this project is the performance Éclats mats, created in 2001 and revived in 2005 at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. After the creation of that work, I chose to isolate the performers on stage to go deeper into the exploration of corporeal matter and bodily states, the occupation of space and the relationship to time that I had established in the ‘mother’-piece. I also wanted to probe the effects of the passage of time on our corporeal memory.
In terms of form, the work consists of a series of ‘accompanied solos’, expressed through a game of relay where the principal actor of each chapter cedes his/her place to one of the accompanists for the following chapter, who is in turn accompanied by someone else. By choosing and distorting the form of the solo, I wish to explore the solitude staged in Éclats mats, in greater depth, sometimes by accentuating, sometimes by attenuating.
I also wanted to play with time and to question the impressions left by certain events and physical experiences, whilst continuing to question myself about how contact, supports and the observation of sights, physical touch and sound, can reveal our own body to each of us. The body has therefore been adopted as a tool to acquire knowledge and sensations, through a certain bodily state and corporality specific to each person and to each new chapter.
The series of accompanied solos has been transformed over time into a modular work, by the six years between the creations of the first and the final parts, while I was working in parallel on the creation of histoire(s), and that I initiated the documentary research work on The Green Table.
The first accompanied solo was created with and for Vincent Druguet, in the immensity of the stage of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2004. Vincent will forever remain in my head. But Vincent is gone forever since then, and life’s vagaries have resulted in someone else, Sylvain Prunenec, literally incorporating this material, digesting it and presenting it to us in another way.
The question of the distance which we have to make the audience travel, in order to lead them to see the work, remains relevant. It is a path that has to be forged and which is constructed by a team, with the audience, during the whole performance. It poses the question of what there is to show and reveal, on each occasion in each new phase. Each chapter contains the seeds of those which follow; and are also the branches, stems, leaves and ramifications of the previous ones… they are thus both root and leaf at the same time.
Olga de Soto