Press Release: Boris Charmatz makes Sadler's Wells debut with enfant

[Jan McNulty]

Boris Charmatz / Musée de la danse

enfant                                                                                                                                       UK PREMIERE

Wednesday 29 & Thursday 30 January

Tickets: £12 - £27

Ticket office: 0844 412 4000 www.sadlerswells.com

 

Dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz is renowned for subverting forms of dance and movement. Having previously presented work in London at Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery, for Charmatz’s Sadler’s Wells debut he presents the UK premiere of enfant on 29 and 30 January 2014.

 

enfant explores an innovative style of choreography, utilising inert bodies and exploring the relationship between muscular energy and movement. It features a cast of nine adult dancers, twelve children and a musician. A strange, numb ballet unfolds, in which traditional relationships become reversed and borders blur between young and old, professionals and amateurs, the living and the dead.

 

Charmatz analyses contemporary movement and its complex histories through acclaimed collaborations, re-staging and institutional learning. He developed enfant from one of his earlier works, régi, from 2005, in which dancers’ bodies were moved by machines. This has been extended to investigate the idea of the movement of inert bodies, and enfant places children at the centre of the piece.

 

He says: “Children often bring life and play into shows… enfant imagines the dance of children who do not dance; the dance of the sleeping and of the abandoned.” He adds: “An inert object is not necessarily motionless, it can be set into motion. It is precisely this slight difference that I play with in enfant.”

 

Charmatz has been Director of the Rennes and Brittany National Choreographic Centre since 2009, which he proposes to transform into a Musée de la danse. Charmatz trained as a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet School and then at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse, Paris. In 1992 he co-founded Association edna with Dimitri Chamblas. Charmatz was resident artist at the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin, from 2002 to 2004. He presented Flip Book at The Tanks at Tate Modern in September 2012, and héâtre-élévision at the Hayward Gallery as part of the Move: Choreographing You exhibition in 2010.

 

Charmatz lives and works in Rennes and maintains an extensive touring schedule, creating improvised pieces while continuing his work as a performer with Tino Sehgal and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

 

Free post-show talk (BSL interpreted): Wednesday 29 January