ARCHIVES 2012 / Tragédie

Experiencing a blinding, dazzling, deafening humanity. No longer distinguishing bodies so that these masses in motion, archaic flights, rise to the surface. With Tragedy, Olivier Dubois propels us into a “sensation of the world” more than a choreographic piece. The simple fact of being a man does not make humanity: therein lies the tragedy of our existence. Because it is only between the bodies, between the telluric pressures that arise from each of us, and through our conscious and deliberate engagements that this humanity will well up. Overexposed in their nakedness to better incarnate this obvious anatomical variation, nine women and nine men propose a state of the original body, a solicitation of their human gender rid of historical, sociological and psychological turmoil, to form in the end a chorus like a glorious song/body. Walking, staying upright, facing, first by incessant comings and goings, then by hammering the ground and in this way making the step the fundamental gesture of their will. Olivier Dubois has created a play as manifesto, obsessional, even hypnotic, in which, in an ebbing and flowing movement, these men and women merge, disappear; the rubbing of their engaging creates the crash. A slit opens and lets the precious transcendence of a human community be glimpsed in this commotion. RB