Aatt enen tionon

Intense, fast and virtuoso

In 1992 two young dancers, Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas, set up their own production company, Association edna. They knew each other from the famous École de danse at the Paris Opera, had already danced separately in various choreographic works and together with Régine Chopinot. A year later they made their debut with À bras-le-corps. In 1998 they presented this in the Kaaistudio’s.

Association edna soon evolved into a workplace, a laboratory. Here Charmatz created almost all his work and emerged as a leading, radical choreographer. In 2009 Charmatz was appointed director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. He renamed it Musée de la danse; it was not a museum but a new type of ‘public space for and through dance’. Last season he was one of the principal guests in Performatik 2013 and danced alongside Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Partita 2.

Now, twenty years after its creation, we will once again be staging À bras-le-corps, together with another early work, Aatt enen tionon, which has not often been staged in Belgium.

In Aatt enen tionon (pronounced 'Attention') Charmatz places his three dancers on a metal tower, each on a different level, on small platforms from which they can neither see nor touch one another. All certainties are removed. The dancers are naked except for a T-shirt. Their movements are not supported by music but by a voice. The audience walks around the tower and explores the dance from every possible angle. A radical piece of movement theatre!