10000 gestures

For 10000 gestes, I envision a choreographic forest in which no dancer ever repeats any of the gestures, each of which will be shown only once and will vanish as soon as it has been executed, like an ode to the impermanence of the art of dance. This shower of movements, which could have been a data project generated by lists of digital parameters, will be instead generated in an artisanal way, using the very bodies of the performers, in an absolutely subjective way. The visual hypnosis exerted by the explosion of movements will have a corresponding meditative, or even melancholic, aspect: the "gift" of movements doomed to symbolic disappearance. This idea came to me as I was watching the "permanent" version of Levée des conflits, danced at MoMA: in Levée des conflits, we construct a sculpture that aims at immobility, but which is animated by a crowd of dancers who ensure a permanent presence of movement maintained through its indefinite transmission. In 10000 gestes, by contrast, it is the ephemeral taken to the extreme that engenders the gaze and the thought of the spectator. The chaos of expenditure is so perfect that it vergers on immobility. In line with other projects of the Musée de la danse, 10000 gestes constitutes a choreographic anti-museum aiming to explore the means of escaping the instinct and the strategies of preservation at work in the activity of a dancer... It will be matter of exploring the possibility that one gesture is never completed by another, and that, if 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 25 dancers come in contact, each still executes a gesture distinguished from those of others through the exclusion of any symmetrical movement: in this piece, it is impossible to shake someone’s hand. The collection thus constituted is also an anti-collection, since no choreographer worthy of the name would risk incorporating 10000 gestes in his or her score, and this totality cannot be comprehended other than by the idea that generated it.

Boris Charmatz