Instance, the first official creation by the Diverrès-Montet duo – who had just established themselves as the Studio DM – and the only choreography to bear this double signature, shapes with force and finesse many of the elements which would herald work to come. Premiered at the Terpsychore Theatre in Tokyo in 1983, during a trip to Japan with Kazuo Ohno, this work would go on to be described as leaving “the master of butoh, himself, speechless”. Instance was awarded first prize in the Nyon International Choreography Competition (Switzerland) and was also honoured with the City of Vernier award. Nonetheless, the work only won wide acclaim in 1987 when it was reproduced at the Avignon Festival and then at the Théâtre de la Ville.

Graphical quintessence pushed to its limit, Instance defines a highly-particular zone that plays on a totally chiaroscuro atmosphere, which seems progressively driven by impenetrable powers.

At the beginning, we can make out a sort of two-headed figure, swinging from side to side, with only the faces lit up. The surrounding twilight bestows an element of profound secret on them, or even an element of being engulfed in incommensurable darkness, as if they were lost in a forest that had no end and no depth. As such, the two faces, lunar for Catherine Diverrès, vigilant for Bernardo Montet, henceforth exposed to the light, seem to embrace a power of fused closeness, in their void, that is almost fraternal. The bodies are illuminated at exactly the same moment that the lighting genders them, the woman in a long silken red dress, the man in a beige and grey lounge suit.

“Me-You? I-Thou. Is it only a double person? I-Thou. It is not at all one who is two, neither two who are one. I-THOU. It is the experience where everything is included. Is it only a double person? If one arrives at this point, the earth, the star, the sun, the wind, the cries of birds, the light from within, the big tides, everything is present”. [1]

Here, it is a question of a dance that establishes its density in a particular economy of time. Even though, at the beginning, the detachment of the bodies, then their unfurling through the space takes place without haste, very quickly, the bodies fathom each other through their crises. This permanent state of tension is rooted in the movement itself, attraction/repulsion, seizing the powers of the bodies/abandoning the bodies, suspensions/slackening, but also in the play on contrast between lights and darkness, black and colours, masculine and feminine, small space and large space,... which end up by producing a narrative. The bodies, as is generally the case in Catherine Diverrès’ works, seem to embrace their role of man and woman, inducing, first and foremost, a rather archetypal affinity with gender and with relationship: the embrace, in particular, is considered as an accident, a stimulation, a step and not as a natural body state. A form of violence that is sporadic, dispersed, bursts forth from this, yet one that is paradigmatic of the adjacent and/or underlying metaphysical conflicts which haunt Instance, which liberate quite quickly the scope of the work from the one and only distinction, between masculine and feminine.

“The road rises, spiralling
No straight track, no flat track
Turn around, around yourself: look at me
The road rises, spiralling
A smell of crushed strawberries remains”. [2]

The indication of plurality, present in both bodies, is illustrated in particular during the passages where the state of solitude comes into play; in fact, the body that would dance alone could, ultimately, experience all the violence of the dualism that each of us has within us...

“The sole stays at the bottom of the water for a long time. A very long time. It accepts the water pressure. This is actually the climax of dance. When you manage to accumulate the weight of the world, the weight of feelings, of a lot of things... and hold on to it”. [3]

Alice GERVAIS-RAGU

[1] Jerzy Grotowski, Art of the Beginner
[2] Catherine Diverrès, à propos d'Instance
[3] Kazuo Ohno

CRITICAL RECEPTION

“Instance captivates by its power just as much as by its vertiginousness. The impassioned duo entrapped in the halo of the lights has generated a great deal of coverage. Two fragments of texts, by way of statement of intent, have remained in the Company’s files. To a certain extent, they set the tone and provide the reasons for the wonderment of the public and critics vis-à-vis this revelation”.

Irène Filiberti, “Se trouver, se perdre, inventer” in Catherine Diverrès, Mémoires passantes, Ed. Centre national de la danse, 2010

“(...) Instance offers the two dancers the opportunity to return to their roots. It relates, above all, the need to dance. (…) Crying when dancing, or suffocating from not dancing. (…) Diverrès-Montet rush headlong into a never-ending void”.

Chantal Aubry, 1987

“Instance, according to Catherine Diverrès, talks about metaphysical forces. Even though this first duo deals with masculine and feminine, it does not establish itself as the representation of the couple dancing. This work addresses the abstraction of negative-positive poles and merges an intense, sophisticated dance”.

Irène Filiberti, “Se trouver, se perdre, inventer” in Catherine Diverrès, Mémoires passantes, Ed. Centre national de la danse, 2010

Updating: March 2014

Catherine Diverrès has said, “Conscience, our relationship with others, this is what creates time”, ever since her first choreographic creation. She is a sort of strange meteor, appearing in the landscape of contemporary dance in the mid-80’s. She stood out almost immediately in her rejection of the tenets of post-modern American dance and the classically-based vocabularies trending at that time. She trained at the Mudra School in Brussels under the direction of Maurice Béjart, and studied the techniques of José Limón, Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais before joining the company of Dominique Bagouet in Montpellier, then deciding to set out on her own choreographic journey.

Her first work was an iconic duo, Instance, with Bernardo Montet, based upon a study trip she took to Japan in 1983, during which she worked with one of the great masters of butoh, Kazuo Ohno. This marked the beginning of the Studio DM. Ten years later she was appointed director of the National Choreographic Center in Rennes, which she directed until 2008.

Over the years, Catherine Diverrès has created over thirty pieces, created her own dance language, an extreme and powerful dance, resonating with the great changes in life, entering into dialogues with the poets: Rilke, Pasolini and Holderlin, reflecting alongside the philosophers Wladimir Jankelevich and Jean-Luc Nancy, focusing also on the transmission of movement and repertoire in Echos, Stances and Solides and destabilising her own dancing with the help of the plastician Anish Kapoor in L’ombre du ciel.

Beginning in 2000, she began adapting her own style of dance by conceiving other structures for her creations: she improvised with the music in Blowin, developed projects based on experiences abroad, in Sicily for Cantieri, and with Spanish artists in La maison du sourd. Exploring the quality of stage presence, gravity, hallucinated images, suspensions, falls and flight — the choreographer began using her own dance as a means of revealing, revelation, unmasking, for example in Encor, in which movements and historical periods are presented. Diverrès works with the body to explore the important social and aesthetic changes of today, or to examine memory, the way she did in her recent solo in homage to Kazuo Ohno, O Sensei.

And now the cycle is repeating, opening on a new period of creation with the founding of Diverrès’ new company, Association d’Octobre, and the implantation of the company in the city of Vannes in Brittany. Continuing on her chosen path of creation and transmission, the choreographer and her dancers have taken on a legendary figure, Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, in Penthésilée(s). In returning to group and collective work, this new work is indeed another step forward in the choreographer’s continuing artistic journey.

Source: Irène Filiberti, website of the company Catherine Diverrès

More information: compagnie-catherine-diverres.com