manger (dispersed)

As part of If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? Charmatz presents a dispersed version of his new work manger. This unique version address the scale of the Turbine Hall, while offering an intimate relation to the work.

In manger Charmatz challenges the role that the mouth and eating play in choreography, dance and performance.

How to set bodies in motion not with the eyes, or with the limbs, but with the mouth? How to use this hollowness as a perceptual frame in its own right? The mouth is a crossroads where food, voices, breath, words, and saliva intermix: it is a locus of circulation, where the inside and the outside, the self and the other meet, taste each other, engage each other, interchange, and ingest each other.

By picking up this metaphor as the vehicle for his choreography, Charmatz marks out a general field of orality: dough chewed and swallowed is physical matter become a proliferating concoction. It swells, it sings, it is savored, it blends, it spreads mouth to mouth until it invades the whole space. In this continuous movement of ingestion, there emerge masticated melodies, paintings of flesh, sculptures of voice, food, and skin, which sketch a collective, sensual horizon. At the boundary between a mobile installation and an indeterminate sound object, manger is a 'swallowed reality', an ingurgitated utopia: a slow digestion of the world.

UK premiere of manger at Sadler’s Wells is on 19 and 20 May 2015.

Choreography: Boris Charmatz
Interpretated by: Or Avishay, Matthieu Barbin, Nuno Bizarro, Ashley Chen, Olga Dukhovnaya, Alix Eynaudi, Julien Gallée-Ferré, Peggy Grelat-Dupont, Christophe Ives, Maud Le Pladec, Filipe Lourenço, Mark Lorimer, Mani A. Mungai, Marlène Saldana, Frank Willens
Light: Yves Godin
Sound: Olivier Renouf
Arrangements and vocal training: Dalila Khatir
Choreographic assistant: Thierry Micouin
General stage manager: Mathieu Morel
Dresser: Marion Regnier
Production: Sandra Neuveut, Martina Hochmuth, Amélie-Anne Chapelain
Sound material: Ticket Man, The Kills ; Hey Light, Animal Collective ; King Kong, Daniel Johnston ; Leisure Force, Aesop Rock ; Je t’obéis, Sexy Sushi ; La Folia, Arcangelo Corelli ; Symphony n°7, Ludwig van Beethoven ; Qui habitat, Josquin des Prez ; Three Voices, Morton Feldman ; Lux Alternae, György Ligeti
Directed by Boris Charmatz
Text: Le bonhomme de merde in L’Enregistré, Christophe Tarkos, P.OL., 2014.

Produced by Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. The association receives grants from the Ministry of Culture and Communication (Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs / Brittany), the City of Rennes, the Regional Council of Brittany and Ille-et-Vilaine General Council.

The Institut français regularly supports the international touring of Musée de la danse.

Coproduced by Ruhrtriennale-International Festival of the Arts ; Théâtre National de Bretagne-Rennes; Théâtre de la Ville and Festival d’Automne Paris; steirischer herbst Graz; Holland Festival Amsterdam; Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main.

Created at the Ruhrtriennale – International Festival of the Arts 2014.

Thanks to Imane Alguimaret, Marguerite Chassé, Noé Couderc, Lune Guidoni, Hypolite Tanguy, the students from P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels) and from the Master-Studiengang Performance Studies (University of Hamburg), Alexandra Vincens.

Duration: 1 hour