Memories of a Lord / Olivier Dubois
After My Chosen Black (Sacre #2) (1), a solo created for Germaine Acogny in 2015, Olivier Dubois returns to compositional work for a plurality of bodies. Thirty men, amateur dancers, invade the stage of Mémoires d’un seigneur and echo the lone man, the lord-dancer Sébastien Perrault.
Tragédie Extended and Aura, the two short plays which preceded the creation of Mémoires d'un Seigneur, very pertinently echoed each other and aptly announced Olivier Dubois' new play. Eight students from the Lille Conservatory danced a condensed rewriting of Tragédie, a difficult score due to the almost mechanical precision it requires, as well as the density of presence it demands. The young girls carried the rise of the piece in an astonishing way. The scansion of steps and jumps in Tragédie Extended was transformed into a scansion of breaths, screams, groans in the piece by Christophe Béranger and Jonathan Pranlas-Descours, performed by students from the Ballet du Nord school. Air which passes through and pierces the bodies, making them appear as thin but indestructible membranes between an interior and an exterior which end up merging as the circulation of breath is so vigorous.
The homogeneous mass of bodies is the principle which guides, as in Révolution (2) (2009) or Tragédie (3) (2012), the writing of Mémoires d’un Seigneur. Same master plan: increased bass power, contained explosion and intensity of presence. As is often the case, Olivier Dubois approaches the viewer through the discomfort of the long first minutes which establish the repetition or the slowness, wondering what will happen. The spectator's attention is put to the test. She must lend herself to the requirement imposed on her first, in order to receive what follows. This time is an airlock.
“It is perhaps the story of a king, of immense solitude” writes the choreographer. Man alone is the first and endless image of creation. He slowly crosses the plateau under variations of light, like variations of day. Then comes civilization: the plateau is invaded by thirty men who advance, a serious and powerful image. They embody the chimeras that haunt the mind of the man of power and whisper in his ear. The partition is binary: face-to-face between the lone man and the uniform pack.
Olivier Dubois spoke to fans through images. This infinite one-way race, from courtyard to garden, is the wind; this mass of bodies swarming in the cubic space drawn by the ground, the top of a table and its four legs, are snakes, or else the entrails of the Lord; This pile of motionless bodies is the mass grave. These amateurs had the chance to experience the creative process, to be the choreographer's material to model. Those who follow, from town to town, will learn the score and will, in turn, become the choir, a living setting, the “states of mind” of this Lord prey to mad solitude.
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