Everybody dance!
On your feet, London — choreographer Boris Charmatz’s Tate Modern takeover kicks off our dance special. No wallflowers allowed, says Lyndsey Winship
THE normal mood in an art gallery is one of hushed concentration and slow-paced silence, but next weekend French choreographer Boris Charmatz plans to change all that, turning Tate Modern into a place full of energy, movement , s weat a nd dance. Under Charmatz’s direction, it won’t be paintings and sculptures you’ll be looking at, but bodies krumping, clog dancing and moonwalking. And if Charmatz gets his way, you won’t just be watching, you’ll be dancing too.
It’s part of a London season that sees Charmatz straddling two major London arts venues, Tate Modern and Sadler’s Wells. You might not have heard of Charmatz but he’s at the forefront of new thinking about what dance can be, and has as many fans in the visual art world as in dance. Charmatz was last here in January 2014 with his provocative Enfant — which featured dancers dangling from a giant crane on stage, and a cast of untrained children — but this commission is a huge step up in terms of profile.
When we meet in a book-lined back room at the Bankside galler y, the buoyant and loquacious Frenchman is masterminding his takeover. “We are re ally trying to invade Tate Modern,” he says , with a certain delight. “But of course we do it only with our bodies, we don’t smash the paintings.”
Charmatz is a man full of questions and not answers, whos e train of thought takes regular detours and never quite pulls in at a station. An insatiably curious artist, he trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School but left classical ballet behind to perform and create more experimental work.
In 2009, aged 36, he took over the National Choreographic Centre in Rennes, Brittany, and immediately changed its name to the Musée de la Danse, underlining hi s big arti stic question, and the one he’s bringing to
Tate: “What is a ‘dancing museum’? What might happen there? If we merge the cultures of the theatre and the gallery, could something new be created?”
When he first posed the question people thought it was a joke. “Everybody thought it was stupid, bec ause dance would die in a museum,” he says. “But now museums are evolving from object- oriented collections to experiences.”
It ’s true, dance has featured in multiple gallery spaces in the capital in recent years — we’ve had Tricia Brown at the Barbican, Siobhan Davies at the ICA and Move, a major exhibition at the Hayward galler y, as well as performances by Merce Cunningham and Michael Clark at Tate Modern. It
‘When people say to me, “I’m not a dancer”, I say, “OK, let’s try”. Then you try, and suddenly you are’
seems Charmatz’s idea was prescient.
In Tate Modern’s gallery spaces he’ll be presenting two pieces, including 20 Dancers for the 20th Century, where an eclectic cast demonstrate steps from 100 years’ worth of dance. “From Charlie Chaplin to Michael Jackson to [Sixties cult choreographer] Yvonne Rainer,” says Charmatz, who likens the peformance to a living archive.
In dance, he explains, the main place movement is stored is not on DVDs, canvases or books, it’s in bodies. “If you want to reconstruct a piece, the main thing you have is the body of the dancers who produced it,” he says. And so all the invited dancers will bring their personal archive — their bodies — and show us their steps.
In the Tate’s Turbine Hall, there’ll be more performances plus lots of chances for viewers to become dancers themseves, starting with a grand warmup at midday. You will be able to see five pieces of Charmatz’s choreography, some performed by his company, one by a group of local amateurs who have rehearsed in advance, and another which will be taught on the day to whoever wants to join in. You only have to learn 25 steps, which you then repeat in minimalist fashion. From there, the Turbine Hall turns into a dancefloor with a DJ. “A kind of nightclub,” says Charmatz, “but it’s daylight.”
The space and mood of the building will transform throughout, ending with a performance of a new work, Manger, which takes the mouth as its starting point and which Charmatz describes as “a very strange piece where we eat and sing and move at the same time.” Manger will also be performed in a more traditional theatre set-up at Sadler’s Wells the following week. along with two more pieces.
Non-dancer isn’t re ally a term Charmatz recognises. “When people say, ‘I’m not a dancer’, I say, ‘OK, let’s try’. Then you try, and suddenly you are,” he says. The main thing Charmatz wants his audience to do is take part, then take home some movements.
“I would love it if you came to Tate Modern and you thought you would stay 10 minutes or an hour, and stay five hours, or the whole day. And I would like you to feel that the experience is inside you. It’s not just ‘I have a picture of it’. It’s present in yourself. You allow yourself to move in another way, to be conscious in another way.”
Altering your consciousness is something Charmatz thinks dance can do. “Through dance, you can deal with issues that are not connected to dance,” he says. “Equality, sexuality, politics, intimacy and the public sphere. Dance will not solve everything, but it connects us to our environment. The body is an issue for now.”
And you thought you were just having a boogie.