Peuplé, dépeuplé

Christian et François Ben Aïm 2016

Choreographer(s) : Ben Aïm, Christian & François (France)

Present in collection(s): Christian et François Ben Aïm , Intégrales

en fr

Peuplé, dépeuplé

Christian et François Ben Aïm 2016

Choreographer(s) : Ben Aïm, Christian & François (France)

Present in collection(s): Christian et François Ben Aïm , Intégrales

en fr

Inhabited, Uninhabited

This choreographic solo takes off in the assault of the Self, in the fury of the pulsations insufflated by a bass guitar-drum duo, present on stage, at the same time rough and sensitive.

A maze made up of about thirty steles with multiple and moving properties becomes the minefield of the agitated, stable, blind “I”.

Here the mourning of our certainties is played out, between resistance and renunciation, abandonment and deliverance.

A questioning on the states of being in front of itself, carried by a rhythmic, animal dance where nothing is consciously created, but arises in what escapes.

The movement makes the cracks resonate, lets us glimpse the breaks, reveals the fragile strata of what makes us up, to better detach ourselves from them.

Towards what end? Erasure or renewal?

A solo on mourning then, which can make sensitive through dance and stage this passage, this in-between, where attachment, resistance, renunciation, abandonment and deliverance are entangled.

Attempting to decentralize oneself in order to thwart oneself requires setting up renewed, specific creative processes, some of which are still to be invented.

Also to go to the end of this experiment, it is the very intervention of the will which is put aside, the piece draws exclusively its basic material from elements elaborated in dream or revealed under hypnosis. The idea is that all the choreographic material can take its source in the heart of the author, without him being able to claim anything, neither belonging nor ownership.

The project thus holds its specificity in this proposal of not wanting to “create” anything, and to seek to make emerge only pre-existing elements, by “offering” them the possibility of realizing themselves.

The states of the body, the states of dance will be privileged. This mourning must be rather than a story, an ordeal where the dancer’s body, before any other element, carries by its successive choreographic mobilizations the dramaturgical stages of the piece.

Ben Aïm, Christian & François

For more than twenty years, Christian and François BEN AÏM have been building a work rich of poetry and high standards, fraternal bond and singularity.

At the end of a multidisciplinary training combining dance, physical theater and circus, each one follows his path as a performer, then the two brothers meet to create À l’abri du regard des hommes, avant d’aller mourir ailleurs, a hybrid dance-theater piece which marks the beginning of their collaboration in 1997. Twenty pieces will follow which anchor their fieldwork as much as they travel internationally. They draw their inspiration from literary, musical and pictorial sources, and intimately mixing artistic disciplines on the stage : En plein coeur (2006), Valse (2010), The Ogresse on archives and her dog (2011), Lightness of Storms (2014), Burn, rebellious hearts (2017), Mirages — boreal souls (2018), Arise (2019), JESTS (2021).

Marked by an uncompromising energy, summoning the performer to an intimate relationship with movement, the dance of the BEN AÏM brothers offers, beyond a speech, an experience, a "crossing" that the dancer performs in front of our eyes, that he lives each time with the sincerity of a full and entire presence.

With this demanding writing comes an art of composition which gives birth to the stage an imagination borrowing from dreams, from the marvelous of the tale and from invisible realities. Through a subtle effect of empathy, the audience enters an unstable world, where everything is the object of poetic questioning - a world to be experienced together.