À bras-le-corps

The beginning... We wanted to perform far from the normal context of a performance, with the rows of seats and the stage, and also far from our student days. We wanted to install in a closed space a large square of chairs strictly delimiting our movement, abolishing by the same gesture all distance between the audience and ourselves, abolishing any possibility of an escape by one or the other. Everything had to lend itself to our approach: a choreography composed from a sensation of fatigue, a mass crawling with difficulty to a cruel death, restarting again without cease, provisional. Heat and falling mingled, to make death in the same way one plays on words: from the tip of the lips.

... continué But, with time, À bras-le-corps has gotten rid of all its poetical and theoretical arsenal; it remains, at the very most, a few notes of intentions, archived press clippings and photographs – and both of us have frontally attacked a lot of other work – "exploits" rather than "labors". After the dust has settled, our energy appears marked by the desire for power and mass, but also by a lively and joyful irony, the choreography giving precedence to a simple and explosive experience. À bras-le-corps, as a first work, held staggering and renewed promise for us. The strict framework adapts itself to our evolution/maturation, and the piece increasingly resembles the concept of clearing the fields: bringing to it our experiences as performers and as men, taking from it the emotive fluxes that the structure of the duet welcomes like the spillway of a dam. By its nature, the project has been able to adapt to every environment, from a Dominican convent to a village assembly hall, from a gymnasium to a prestigious or banal proscenium – and to strike against every surface: wood floors, rough concrete, slabs of stone, black or white linoleum, and even simple countryside earth. The past of this continuing beginning has for us something of an epic....

Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas

In 2017, À bras-le-corps was added to the repertoire of the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris. Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas entrusted the choreography to solo dancers Karl Paquette and Stéphane Bullion.