Levée
by Boris Charmatz and César Vayssié
14'14'', or in a continuous loop
Digital HD – Colour – Silent
The 24 dancers of the choreographic piece Levée des conflits, by Boris Charmatz, perform an extract of the show on top of a slag-heap in Germany.
Film maker César Vayssié and choreographer Boris Charmatz filmed this never ending spiral with their on-board helicopter camera.
Filmed on August 23, 2013 in Halde Haniel, Bottrop, Germany, with the kind permission of Ruhrtriennale — International Festival of the Arts and of RAG Aktiengesellschaft.
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A film by Boris Charmatz and César Vayssié
With Or Avishay, Eleanor Bauer, Matthieu Barbin, Magali Caillet-Gajan, Ashley Chen, Sonia Darbois, Kerem Gelebek, Peggy Grelat-Dupont, Gaspard Guilbert, Christophe Ives, Dominique Jégou, Lénio Kaklea, Jurij Konjar, Élise Ladoué, Maud Le Pladec, Catherine Legrand, Naiara Mendioroz, Andreas Albert Müller, Mani A. Mungai, Élise Olhandéguy, Qudus Onikeku, Felix Ott, Annabelle Pulcini, and Simon Tanguy
Photography and editing César Vayssié
Assistant choreographer Anne-Karine Lescop
Sound Olivier Renouf
Unit Fabrice Le Fur
Dresser Stefani Gicquiaud
Helicopter Pilot Holger Lubbe
Helicopter machinist Thomas Lempke
Helicopter Heli NRW
Camera equipment Loca-images
Postproduction Firm
Acknowledgments
Yves Godin and the team of collaborators in the performance Levée des conflits, namely the dancers Nuno Bizarro, Matthieu Burner, Olga Dukhovnaya, Olivia Grandville, Taoufiq Izeddiou,Thierry Micouin, Fabrice Ramalingom, and Nabil Yahia-Aïssa.
Heiner Goebbels, artistic director, and Marietta Piekenbrock, as well as Andreas Dietmann, André Grüss, Christiane Schmitz, and the whole Ruhrtriennale — International Festival of the Arts team.
Michael Sagenschneider and Bernd Lorscheidt — RAG Aktiengesellschaft.
Alban Teurlai, Thierry Demaizières, and Léo Monnet — Falabracks.
Matthieu Goeury, performing arts programming, Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gand.
Produced by Musée de la danse — Museum of Dance / Sandra Neuveut, Martina Hochmuth, Amélie-Anne Chapelain.
Co-produced by Same Art Producers / Dimitri Chamblas and Amélie Couillaud.
Based on Levée des conflits (2010). Performance for 24 dancers. Choreography by Boris Charmatz.
© Musée de la danse — Museum of Dance / Same Art — 2014.
Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. Director: Boris Charmatz. The association receives the support of the French Minister of Culture and Communication (Regional Office of Cultural Affairs / Brittany), the City of Rennes, and the Regional Council of Brittany and the General Council of Ille-et-Villaine.
Photo © César Vayssié / Boris Charmatz / Musée de la danse
Levée
A labyrinthine performance, constructed on the basis of an extensive canon of derivative gestures, Levée des conflits is impossible to recreate in its totality: it is a snapshot of 25 simultaneous gestures that the eye cannot take in with a single glance. Rather than try to capture something of this perceptual experience, César Vayssié opted for an unclassifiable film, something between an abstract bird’s eye view, a documentary, and a genre film. Shot in the Ruhr region, on the “Halde Haniel” mining site — an immense plateau shaped like a spiral — Vayssié’s film propels the dance into an indeterminate zone, somewhere between science fiction and anthropology.
Stranded in this lunar landscape, the dancers appear to be carried by an entropic movement, caught in the downward spiral of emotions: the fatigue, the repetition, the bitter struggle with the gestural material are magnified as if under a glass, generating a chaos of juxtaposed physical states. Lashed by the coal dust, the camera lens makes its way through this moving mass, and, in a fragmentary way, reveals the participants in a strange ceremony that has no other purpose than the exhaustion of forms and the depletion of strength. What is there to see? What point of view to adopt? Is this a ritual recorded live, an extreme “flashmob,” a miners’ movement, or an ephemeral monument, visible only from above? Passing from confusion to a bird’s eye view, from sweat to structure, the camera affords us a glimpse of the organic and mathematical machine envisioned by Boris Charmatz: “a permanent and infinite dance on the dark mountain of Halde Haniel, for the man who had created it.”
Gilles Amalvi