Three themes emerge from the many performances at a perennial festival for new choreographers
Unlike the postponed springtime in France, Artdanthé Festival rewarms dance lovers as usual in Vanves, a suburban town south of Paris. For 27 consecutive years, the Théâtre de Vanves has dedicated this festival mainly to young choreographers, both from France and other European countries. This year, the audience could see 22 dance performances in 3 weeks, and I spotted three recurrent themes.
1. Set a humorous tone
Luxembourgish artists Simone Mousset and M. Chevalier opened the festival in the town hall wedding room with The Great Chevalier. Instead of preparing a facsimile of vows and flowers, they invented a ‘global tribute tour’ of a fictitious dance company, Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. The local mayor was in on the act, explaining in his inaugural speech that the wedding room used to be the company’s refuge. Did you start chuckling? More laughs arose when Chevalier demonstrated the ‘pigeon dance’ from the repertoire: simple head-bobbing and arm-waving. Still, setting a dance piece in a spacious flat room full of seats makes it hard to follow everything, despite Chevalier’s best efforts to interact with the audience, teaching a collective arm-unfurling dance.
Unlike Mousset’s conceptual absurdity, the humour in RRRRRIGHT NOW (Paola Stella Minni and Konstantinos Rizos) seems more approachable as soon as the four male performers appear in baroque-style black court attire, paired with black trunks and socks. When an anecdote about Louis XIV’s anal fistula is projected on the back wall, the absence of trousers suddenly makes sense. Its ridiculousness continues in clown-like movements, amateurish singing, and parodies. The performance ends with a projected text about our rotten future, tying this amusing creation to our current context.
Humour could also be discreet: Konstantinos Papanikolaou’s A User’s Manual traces his creative process of making a dance piece amply contemporary for the audience. Sitting in front of his PC, he fosters his thinking on this ‘new’ performance as if it were created for Artdanthé, questioning representations and their circumstances, in stereotypes for example. In addition to the lecture, Papanikolaou leaves the desk to illustrate some dance fragments, notably a Greek sirtaki. He also projects a short rehearsal video. A duration of 40 minutes seems too short to fully elaborate on the thinking behind a creative process and the enjoyment of such a witty structure is not unanimous, particularly for the contemporary dance newbies (presumably teens from a school in town) who were whispering during the whole show. The definition of contemporary dance is always debatable, even when it comes to a festival aiming to reveal its diversity.
The dance archive remains a source of inspiration for young contemporary choreographers. In Les Héritier·x, French Marion Zurbach brings live on stage Thoinot Arbeau’s first dance manual Orchésographie (1588). At the beginning, Zurbach, seated in the front row with the audience, directs dancers to move in a courtly manner along the centre line. The dancers demonstrate a walk alternating steps and stops, synchronised with occasional position switches. Music and vocals (singing and warbling) join later, as the choreography evolves into freer and more individual contemporary movements. It is worth mentioning that the costumes blur the past and present, with a removable cloth transforming from a wrap to a skirt. The birdlike colours of costume and makeup echo with the warbling. A few days later, we see a similar approach in Pol Jiménez’s solo Lo Faunal: this time, the Spanish choreographer turns to Spanish folk dance and Bolero. Here, the dance archive is revived mainly through music, lighting and costume, much less through choreography.
The archive is about more than dance forms: in Histoire(s) Décoloniale(s) #Folly, choreographer Betty Tchomanga returns to the history between the West and Africa. The show was presented in a school in Vanves, with around fifty spectators seated in a ring of student chairs. Circling the inner side of the audience, Tchomanga told, one by one, colonial stories, attuned to her clapping steps. In Wearing the Dead, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust creates costumes based on Iranian culture, interactions with his clothing (dressing and undressing) allowing him to dialogue with his Iranian origin. During the festival, some of his costumes were also exhibited in the theatre. Meanwhile, Matteo Sedda draws from an archive unrelated to his Italian origin: Derek Jarman’s film Blue. In Fuck me blind, Sedda recreates a round dance of two men, hunter and prey, pursuer and desired, peer to peer, enemy to enemy, an erotic metaphor of ‘infinite possibility becoming tangible’ (Jarman).
3. Expressing suffering
Using personal suffering as inspiration sounds natural in artistic expression. In its programme text, Malika Djardi’s Martyre is described as a ‘solo-documentary’. What can dance do with a mother with Alzheimer’s? On screen, episodically, the audience could watch Djardi’s mother dancing mainly with her hands, while on stage Djardi mirrors the movement and enhances it in space. Between projections, Djardi injects a fragmented but well-executed solo, especially the walk on tiptoes. This approach – division or coexistence – does cut the flow, leaving questions. How did she teach her mother dancing? How did her mother feel after dancing? Without the authentic videos, her solo could have stood alone, and Djardi’s poetic and implicit artistic direction dilutes the emotional power of lived suffering.
Suffering, through the prism of gender, is a main theme in the festival’s programme. In Bell End (British slang for a ‘jerk’, also the tip of the penis), choreographer Mathilde Invernon and dancer Arianna Camilli are dressed in male suits and mimic the patriarchal men still omnipresent in our daily lives. Patriarchal domination also features in Harald Beharie’s Batty Bwoy, its title derived from a Jamaican slur for queer men. Beharie goes even further, making the fragile naked body a declaratory strength. Meanwhile, Andrea Givanovitch’s solo Untitled (Some Faggy Gestures) discloses how staging queer bodies challenges social norms. Exile becomes a fate when LGBTQ+ people cannot be accepted in their societies – a focus in Nicola Barry’s new piece La demande d’asile, which portrays the physical and verbal confrontation of an immigration agent and an applicant in exile.
How about dancers suffering from the dance profession itself? In A Solo in the Spotlights, Italian Vittorio Pagani exhibits the dancer’s body during audition, during creation/rehearsal, and in theatres. The body is objectified, even more so when he wears a mask. The brilliant moment of the piece is when he immerses his body in projected text that describes it. (That was before ChatGPT’s boxed Toy Action Figure went viral.)
Two days after the festival finished, another demonstration against cultural budget cuts took place in France. In this context, I hope Artdanthé will continue to offer a stage to many more young artists next year. Will any new themes emerge then? Let’s wait and see! ●
07–28.03.25 Festival Artdansthé, Thêâtre de Vanves, France
