Le Sacre du Printemps des Rues By François Chat

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 13/10/2017
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Location
Dakshinapan Shopping Complex

Categories

OVERVIEW

Le Sacre du Printemps des Rues
by François Chat… et Compagnie

The Company:

“François Chat… et Compagnie” (François cat and company), this title does not refer to a group or a troupe, but a solitary cat that likes company: company that is formed depending on each project and artistic collaboration.

This title can be inverted, as is often the case with a certain approach wherein the actor becomes the object and the object the actor.

An actor dancer-juggler (in one word) and a director.

An interdisciplinary artist, not pluridisciplinary, but more compact like a ball. This ball rolls – this is my journey and the encounters with other artists on the path; diverse horizons mix with this ball that remains compact. It is as undisciplined as a bad student, not returning into the well-known paths of art, instead preferring to leave what is defined.

Since early 90s, especially since 1993 and the creation of Clip-Clop, I seek to work on the body and juggling, as though the balls extended the movement, or as if the body expanded with the balls. Juggling, dance and mime became my modes of expression and I stretch the technique to make space for poetic gesture.

This work extends to the object, developing the same rapport, the same tension depicting the transformation under the guise of symbolism or abstraction.

Spoon, egg, lemon, balance tambourine, shoots, feathers and other objects share the space in my shows.

Each project is a lesson for me, a suspension guiding dramaturgy.

The elements are in my hand so that there is an interaction between them, and once more to produce unity between them. Everything interacts similarly and the show becomes a living object.

The object can be missing, the body being the subject.

All these objects are not manipulated, something that I try to avoid, letting myself being guided by them, inverting the rapport between man and matter, letting the object live in a poetic echo.

Just like Ponge wrote with his feather, I like to plunge myself into the object through the body and space.

It is hard to talk of a general research, as each adventure has its approach, each spectacle its relation.

The Project:

François Chat Le Sacre du Printemps des Rues, solo

Commissioned by the festival Le Printemps des rues, 2009

Creative Residency sponsored by the DRAC

“Le Sacre (the Rite of Spring) – here is an answer to the Printemps des rues.

I have wanted to do my Sacre for a long time, like every honest director wants to do his Hamlet.

To do or not do the rite, that is the question.

Le Sacre du Printemps des Rues seems like a mockery to me – for once an open Rite.

By Jove, this isn’t easy. It should be the signature style, a performance that has been choreographed a hundred times; this is the rule of the game. Do I put my best cat paw forward?

For musical performance, Fred Guiliani will recompose the rite in live.

Stravinsky will be sampled, the rite will be sacrificed, sounds of the street and of everyday life will disturb the partition to dramatize and modernise it so that it can be heard anew.

The space chosen for this creation is the grass of the St Louis Hospital in Paris. Just like the libretto says: Spring. The land is filled with flowers. The land is covered by plants. Feet trample the land.

I have to stick to the rhythmic structure of the work, but create pressurised relations in the temporality of movement, in harmony and contrast.

Leaving the narration to the libretto in the partition to let Stravinsky unsatisfied once again, leaving the spectators to be ancestors, the balls be young girls, the juggler the sacrificed. Seated spectators encircling the game will form the spring rounds.

Thanks to rite, I come back to my specialisation of being a dancer-juggler, bringing juggling to dance, borrowing certain movements from other choreographies of the rite, in the blink of an eye, but also highlighting the journey through time to a rite that is touched by the new spring.”

François Chat