Often time folks in the wide world of dance get hung up on the names of dance makers. Choreographer A make this or that work so it must be awesome or it must be terrible, depending on your personal point of view.
Ballet de Lorraine, from France and their AD Petter Jacobsson are looking to change that approach by commissioning and touring ‘Unknown Pleasures’ a programme that consists of five dance works and nobody outside of the company has any idea who created the pieces. So, we can’t tell you the names of the dance makers or the pieces or the composers, just the names of the dancers.
Ballet de Lorraine say this much about the works;
The project invites five established choreographers to create a 12 – 15 minute piece without the customary “signing” of it… The distinctive, yet unidentified creations are specially commissioned for the evening by the co-producing partners, who are under the strict agreement that these works are to be presented anonymously. The idea is to offer artists the opportunity to create a work with a large group of dancers from the Centre Choregraphique National – Ballet de Lorraine, free from reputation or historical baggage.
Do we recognize a choreographer’s work without their name? What is their movement signature? How does their signing a piece change the experience for an audience? When we have certain expectations of a choreographer’s work the performance experience is often absorbed and valued in reference to their past, or even the genre of dance they have been placed in. With this labelling, a choreographer’s liberty of creation can become fixed, and their evolution fashioned.
In Unknown Pleasures, the choreographic object is put in focus over the power of the recognizable artist. Authorship is abandoned to leave an empty canvas that allows an artist the possibility to return to a moment in a creative process before an identifiable aesthetic was established.
‘Unknown Pleasures’ is performed by Jonathan Archambault, Amandine Biancherin, Agnès Boulanger, Alexis Bourbeau, Tom Caley, Pauline Colemard, Justin Cumine, Giuseppe Dagostino, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Nathan Gracia, Tristan Ihne, Petter Jacobsson, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Jean-Baptiste Plumeau, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Ribes, Ligia Saldanha, Willem Sas, Céline Schoefs and Luc Verbitzky.
Check out eh company’s website for more details and touring information.
Filmed at Oslo Opera House on October 18th 2017.