ARCHIVES 2010 / La Danseuse malade

On the stage, the truck turns around and around, crazily. Jeanne Balibar, pale, in a bad state, drives the machine, or rather submits to it. She narrates a blunt and melancholy text while Boris Charmatz, hanging onto the carcass in motion, tries to climb into it. Between strange choreography, performance at the limits of the possible, exegetic reading, mechanical art installation, The Ailing Dancer proposes on stage an unprecedented experience. Jeanne Balibar, the actress, Boris Charmatz, the dancer: each will go far, the furthest possible, right to the end of this illness that they have made the subject of their joint work. Everything is broken down, jammed, hindered. The voice hesitates between a cry, a groan, droning, a recitative, like a substance to be expelled. The light is ferociously harsh, white or black, a halo in which it seems impossible to hide anything. The machine gradually acquires a terrifying power and rigidity, goes from working condition to a condition of insanity. The bodies are stuck in this diabolical mechanism. Each gesture goes towards the worst and constitutes a part of the path towards death. The movements are done in a loop, at the edge of an abyss whose threat constantly weighs on the two actors and makes it possible to further explore the territory of difficulties. Jeanne Balibar and Boris Charmatz have taken off to those innermost depths of matter accompanied by the writings of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of Butoh, that dance of the shadows born in post-war Japan in reaction to the inherited forms of the past. The idea here is to convey its spirit, notably using the text Inner Building Material, which presents the body as a wreck of the period and dance as a radical experience of illness. Going to the end of this despair: that is what The Ailing Dancer proposes. A strong and troubling trial, the crossing of a dark tumult, via an impossible artistic gesture of absolute sincerity. ADB