CARTEL

Conception, stage design and direction Michel Schweizer

Creation
15 and 16 october 2013
Théâtre d’Arles, scène conventionnée pour des écritures d’aujourd’hui

With CARTEL, I make an attempt at a specific collaboration with former principal dancers who have finished their professional careers. In the human community, my interest continues to be intuitively directed toward people, more particularly those who have very early on adopted an avoidance posture. By choosing to invest themselves professionally in such an activity, they are assured of a daily asceticism: that of keeping themselves permanently at a distance from the order of the world.

As was the case for my precedent pieces, everything which makes up this project is a result of my need to generate an intense and unexpected organization of the living which is nevertheless easily recognizable – in which one can discern certain traits common to human destiny. One of the challenges will be to show how these seasoned professionals, whose lives are saturated with the excellence of a savoir-faire and associated beliefs, will know how to acquire a margin of freedom in the impulse to leave something behind.

This is therefore a work of dispossessing, that cannot be undertaken by anyone but dancers who have arrived at the threshold of a transition/reconversion in their professional and personal history. A sort of downsizing dynamic, that will propose a radical and rare exposure of that which makes up and has made up the intimate professional and social verticality of each dancer.

It also means indirectly interrogating a historically prestigious and protected discipline, which continues to mayntain a very strange relation with the present.

When this art of dancing, which sublimates the body with a normative virtuosity, continues to leave its footprints in the history of the performing art to the point of taking the social representation of the body into strange territories indeed…

With Romain di Fazio, Jean Guizerix, Mael Iger, Dalila Khatir, Michel Schweizer

Artistic assistant Cécile Broqua
Light design Yves Godin
Sound design Nicolas Barillot
Conception energy generator Jeanne Gillard et Nicolas Rivet. adaptation de l’œuvre APPENDICES de Jeanne Gillard et
Nicolas Rivet pour le projet CARTEL sur une idée de
Sèverine Garat (Curatrice)

Technical conception Alexandre Burdin-Francois, Jean-Luc Petit, Théo Reichel et Johann Loiseau
Stage manager Jeff Yvenou

Production 2013 La Coma

Coproducers Opéra National de Bordeaux / Etablissement public du Parc et de la grande Halle de la Villette, Paris / La scène nationale d’Orléans / OARA (office artistique de la région Aquitaine) / IDDAC (agence culturelle de la Gironde) / MC2, Grenoble / Théâtre d’Arles, scène conventionnée pour des écritures d’aujourd’hui / La Filature, scène nationale de Mulhouse / Le Manège de Reims, scène nationale / MA scène nationale, Pays de Montbéliard / Malandain Ballet de Biarritz – Le Centre Chorégraphique National / Le Cuvier CDC d’Aquitaine
Aide à la résidence : Théâtre d’Arles, scène conventionnée pour des écritures d’aujourd’hui / Centre départemental de créations en résidence – Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône
With the support of Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Résidence André de Gouveia et Maison du Brésil à Paris / Centre National de la danse – Pantin – Mise à disposition de studio 
Remerciements à Elisa Boillot – Ostéopathe, Julie Nioche.

Présent lors de la création de Cartel, le danseur étoile Cyrille Atanassoff a du annuler sa participation au spectacle pour cause de blessure.

Photo credit Frédéric Desmesure

17 november 2020

L’Onde – Théâtre Centre d’art à Vélizy-Villacoublay dans le cadre du festival Immersion