À bras-le-corps

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.

For À bras-le-corps, the audience is seated in a rectangular space. A ‘boxing ring’. One dancer sits on a chair, the other lies on the ground. The first movements are slow and sculptural, but then the dancers explode into a very physical, powerful, fast choreography, occasionally intersected by moments of complete darkness in which we hear snatches of Paganini. In À bras-le-corps Charmatz and Chamblas abandon the classical dance idiom and follow their own path in the adventure of modern dance.