Enfant terrible sets up dancing children's republic

The Avignon festival directors appoint an “associate artist” each year to contribute his or her vision to the festival programme. This year it's choreographer Boris Charmatz.

Boris Brussey

“For this position we have chosen people who have a very strong and highly unique artistic world of their own …to take inspiration from a particular way of seeing the world and influence the direction of the festival,” explains festival codirector Vincent Baudriller.

Charmatz is head of the Musée de la danse (dance museum) - a dance centre and company in the city of Rennes in Brittany. He has sought to make the centre "a public space for an art grappling with contemporary questions, an open and experimental public space, resolutely in motion".

The Associate Artist gets the best spot at the festival for the premiere of a newly commissioned work: the open-air courtyard (it seats 2,000) in the world’s largest Gothic building, the Palais des Papes. For the grand occasion, Boris Charmatz has created Enfant (Child), a work that will, he says, “revive the spectator's childhood through feelings that some of them are longing to blot out forever”.

He hopes that each performance will lead to “an ephemeral republic of children”.

But what about the child who pushes adults past their limits and makes them grind their teeth?

Past Associate Artists have been more or less expected to play the role of enfant terrible - to provoke and outrage the bourgeoisie. Christophe Marthaler, last year’s Associate Artist, described himself as a “disorganiser.” His premiere, Blablabla, starred singing popes in modern dress worshiping at a washing machine.

In 2005 Flemish director and Associate Artist Jan Fabre staged The History of Tears, in which nude actors urinated on stage.

Whether Charmatz can help us recapture childhood innocence remains to be seen but there can be no doubt he will to try to expand our ideas about what a dance performance can or should be.