Boris Charmatz

After a series of group pieces and collective events, Boris Charmatz explores for the first time, with SOMNOLE (2021), the minimalist form of the solo in a mental and minimalist choreography, accompanied only by a faint breath: a whistled dance that conveys familiar melodies and crystallisations of gestures in slumber.

Following on from SOMNOLE, a whistled solo, suspended on the edge of a pair of lips, presented at the Festival d’Automne in 2021, Boris Charmatz furthers his investigations into the outer reaches of the breath, paving the way for a dance filled with a silence which is inhabited to the full. In Muette, his body seeks to express what language cannot say. The result is a continual flow of affects that rises up to the surface of the face and skin, and which reflects the intrusions from the world outside. 

A vast configuration consisting of fifty upright pianos forming a large circle, with an ensemble of twenty-five musicians sat at them, their backs to the audience, who are sat in the middle, 11 000 Saiten (11 000 Strings) is a fresco of a fascinating kind. Georg Friedrich Haas invites us to become enthralled, enveloped by a palette of infinite variety, like a sound-based mirror held up to the entire universe.

In GLA55, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns to American minimalist music and explores, for the first time, the work of Philip Glass. Set to four of the composer’s early works, performed live by the ICTUS ensemble, six dancers push abstraction to the frontier with trance.

The architect and visual artist Feda Wardak plunges deep into the depths of Afghan struggles by means of an installation of a spectacular natures, inhabited by the dancers of choreographer Saïdo Lehlouh and Deena Abdelwahed’s sound design.