ARCHIVES 2011 / Exposition universelle

How can an ideology be embodied in sensible forms? What expectations of power does the work of art serve? What marks does political history leave on the body? It is through a solo that Rachid Ouramdane decided to approach these questions, or rather through a duet, since the musician Jean-Baptiste Julien will accompany him on stage in this exploration. Totally in keeping with the show Des témoins ordinaires, for which he met people who had been tortured, the dancer continues his committed reflection, here on the way in which aesthetics have developed in connection with politics, whether in a relationship of subservience (socialist realism obviously comes to mind) or, conversely, of protest. The choreographer, however, unlike his previous approach, chose here not to favour a determined historical period or specific milieu. A way of more directly reaching the universal as the title of this new creation indicates. Rachid Ouramdane is particularly interested in the way an individual - a politician, a sport or music icon - manages to inflame the crowds. What are the physiological or psychological motivations on which the cult of the personality bases itself? What is the kinaesthetic phenomenon at work that, in a stadium or a demonstration, concentrates energies and allows excesses of violence that would not be possible elsewhere? On what does this "thrill of the event" that dispossesses the individual of his singularity rest? These questions run through Exposition universelle, which aims to restore, on stage, the power of fascination to better strip it down and expose its mechanisms. A play that proves endowed with a political acuity that goes beyond the necessary. MF