SOMNOLE by Boris Charmatz, Festival d’Automne à Paris 2021
Performance
Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels — Jun 1st, 2021
After a series of group performances and collective events, Boris Charmatz is returning to the minimalist format of dance solos with a refined cerebral choreography, accompanied only by the sheer sound of whistling: a vaporous dance that transports familiar melodies and concretions of slumberous gestures.
Whistling for yourself, is “like a rough sketch of a steady center in the heart of chaos…” modeling movement in tune with the breath floating from your lips. Inventing your own ever-expanding world – a land of familiar refrains that give way to gestures; whistling a note, forging a melody, then another – like a fleeting map of a state of mind. Following from infini, a show overflowing with orality in which numbers, put into words, flowed from body to body, Boris Charmatz executes a radical slimming of the senses and physical activity. In SOMNOLE, the air escaping in a whistle connects with materializing movement, tenuously interweaving dance and music. As melodies surface, blend and break apart, different states of attachment develop between the sound and the physical dynamics – in turns deliberate, halting, sleepy and acute. Like a body seeking sleep, Boris Charmatz invents an insomniac dance, a refuge of rhythms and refrains at the frontier between waking dreams and opaque reverie.
Gilles Almavi for the Festival d’Automne à Paris.
> SAINT-EUSTACHE CHURCH 12 | 14 > 12 | 16
> MC93 01 | 19 > 01 | 26
Schedules and rates at festival-automne.com
In 2021, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting Boris Charmatz for his creation SOMNOLE.
Photo: Boris Charmatz © Sébastien Dolidon
Boris Charmatz
In 2025, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is presenting, in collaboration with the Guggenheim New York, étrangler le temps by Boris Charmatz and Emmanuelle Huynh.
