ROGER

2019

Crédit photo : © Marcel Weber/MFO, Guillaume Marie, Pol Mathé

Based on the idea of consolation, or more precisely, the figure of the inconsolable (and not the inconsolable), choreographer Guillaume Marie, playwright Igor Dobricic and performer Roger Sala Reyner have created a troubling and contrasting piece, centered/concentrated on a body literally cornered on the stage.

Set to a soundtrack swaying between diffracted tumult and profound silence, this solo traces a slow, organic continuum. Both raw and detailed, her choreography oscillates between suspension and tension, release and jolt. Between the image of an almost hollowed-out body, and the tangible breath of its attempts to escape or expel itself.

A call to the senses seems to guide this writing, which we are given to follow in a very intimate proximity. It’s the story of a body that’s passed through, jostled, and that we find ourselves smelling, hearing and observing in minute detail.

ROGER

2019

CAST

A piece by: Guillaume Marie, Roger Sala Reyner & Igor Dobričić
Concept and Choreography: Guillaume Marie
Created in collaboration with and performed by: Roger Sala Reyner
Concept, Dramaturgy: Igor Dobričić
Light Design: Marcel Weber/MFO
Help for the costume:Cédrick Debeuf
Music: Kazuyuki Kishino aka KK Null
(Ultimate Material III Part 2, from Ultimate Material III, 1995 – Drops of Variable Lights / Beyond the Darkness, 2017-2021)
Song lyrics: Björk (Come to Me, from Debut, 1993)

Thanks to: Grégoire Gitton, Anna Le Houerf, Erwan Coëdelo, Matthieu Hocquemiller, Suet Wan Tsang, Jean-Marc Diebold, Pol Mathé, David Dibilio, Ludger Orlok & Frauke Niemann.

CAST

A piece by: Guillaume Marie, Roger Sala Reyner & Igor Dobričić
Concept and Choreography: Guillaume Marie
Created in collaboration with and performed by: Roger Sala Reyner
Concept, Dramaturgy: Igor Dobričić
Light Design: Marcel Weber/MFO
Help for the costume:Cédrick Debeuf
Music: Kazuyuki Kishino aka KK Null
(Ultimate Material III Part 2, from Ultimate Material III, 1995 – Drops of Variable Lights / Beyond the Darkness, 2017-2021)
Song lyrics: Björk (Come to Me, from Debut, 1993)

Thanks to: Grégoire Gitton, Anna Le Houerf, Erwan Coëdelo, Matthieu Hocquemiller, Suet Wan Tsang, Jean-Marc Diebold, Pol Mathé, David Dibilio, Ludger Orlok & Frauke Niemann.

PRODUCTION

Production
TAZCORP/

Administration, production: Guillaume Bordier

Co-Productions / partners
Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (F),
Tanzfabrik Berlin (All),
Etape Danse – Fabrik Potsdam,
CDCN La Maison (Uzes),
Théâtre de Nimes,
institut Français (All),
Théâtre de Vanves (F),
Emmetrop (F),
Drac Ile de France – project support 2018,
Institut Français – Berlin.

Residencies:
Tanzfabrik – Uferstudio (Berlin – All)
Antre Peaux (Bourges – FR)
Fabrik Potsdam (All)

PRODUCTION

Production
TAZCORP/

Administration, production: Guillaume Bordier

Co-Productions / partners
Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (F),
Tanzfabrik Berlin (All),
Etape Danse – Fabrik Potsdam,
CDCN La Maison (Uzes),
Théâtre de Nimes,
institut Français (All),
Théâtre de Vanves (F),
Emmetrop (F),
Drac Ile de France – project support 2018,
Institut Français – Berlin.

Residencies:
Tanzfabrik – Uferstudio (Berlin – All)
Antre Peaux (Bourges – FR)
Fabrik Potsdam (All)

TOURING

#Préfigurations :
#1 Tanzfabrik – Uferstudios, Berlin, 25 février 2018
#2 Festival Artdanthé, Vanves, 5 avril 2018
#3 Antre-Peaux, Bourges, 11 mai 2018
#4 Fabrik Potsdam, 25 aout 2018

Première : Open Spaces ! Tanzfabrik, Berlin, 4 et 5 mars 2019

Antre-Peaux, Bourges, le 24 mai 2019
Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, 15 et 16 juin 2019.
Festival Uzes Danse CDCN La Maison – 20 et 21 Juin 2019
Festival A Corps, TAP Poitiers, 8 et 9 avril 2020 (annulé pour cause de crise sanitaire)
Zurich Moves ! Mars 2021 (annulé pour cause de crise sanitaire)
Tanznacht Berlin, 23 et 24 juillet 2021
Festival Trente Trente, Bordeaux, 20 janvier 2023

TOURING

#Préfigurations :
#1 Tanzfabrik – Uferstudios, Berlin, 25 février 2018
#2 Festival Artdanthé, Vanves, 5 avril 2018
#3 Antre-Peaux, Bourges, 11 mai 2018
#4 Fabrik Potsdam, 25 aout 2018

Première : Open Spaces ! Tanzfabrik, Berlin, 4 et 5 mars 2019

Antre-Peaux, Bourges, le 24 mai 2019
Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, 15 et 16 juin 2019.
Festival Uzes Danse CDCN La Maison – 20 et 21 Juin 2019
Festival A Corps, TAP Poitiers, 8 et 9 avril 2020 (annulé pour cause de crise sanitaire)
Zurich Moves ! Mars 2021 (annulé pour cause de crise sanitaire)
Tanznacht Berlin, 23 et 24 juillet 2021
Festival Trente Trente, Bordeaux, 20 janvier 2023

Photos : © Marcel Weber/MFO, Guillaume Marie, Pol Mathé

Interview with Guillaume Marie

Where did the idea for this solo come from?

For my last two pieces (Edging and Ruin Porn), I spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of apocalypse with Igor Dobricic, with whom I’ve been collaborating for the past ten years – we co-write the pieces together. Once taken out of its religious context, what does this “revelation” (apokálupsis, in Greek) still mean today, and how can it be a point of inspiration for dance? During this research, we came across Le Temps de la Consolation by philosopher Michaël Foessel. He argues that we shouldn’t think of the apocalypse as a sudden event that would fracture our times – which is the Christian way of looking at it – but rather that we’re already in the middle of it: we’re facing a succession of crises (environmental, economic, societal…) without any real paradigm shift, without us having moved into the time after. From there, we set ourselves the question of how to think about this aftermath. Still guided by Foessel’s writings, we came to the conclusion that before we could begin to conceptualize utopias, we would first have to learn to console ourselves for what we had lost, while asking ourselves how the space of the theater might lend itself to this. […] ROGER is the first in a series of “allegories of consolation” created for and with loved ones, each of which will bear their name. In this case: performer and choreographer Roger Sala Reyner.

An allegory of consolation?

Allegory in the sense that we can recognize and follow a line around an idea, but without fully grasping all its elements. From a formal point of view, the piece is a superimposition of different layers that give the sensation of being able to identify and feel things, without there being any narrative keys or even a narrative at stake. […] Michaël Foessel deconstructs consolation by defining the figures it activates: the consoler, the inconsolable and the unconsolate. It’s this last figure that we’ve been working on here, a figure who takes a critical look at what he or she has lost and who, from there, can eventually find a solution to this loss, emerging from his or her state of inconsolation. Our next piece is scheduled for 2021 and will be called SNOW CLOUD with Maria Stamenkovic Herranz and Suet Wan Tsang (Snow Cloud in Chinese). We’ll be focusing on the figure of the inconsolable.

What can you tell us about the uniqueness of the triangle-shaped space in which this solo is constructed?

The idea was to bring the audience into close proximity with the performer, who finds himself backed into a corner. This image seemed to us to make sense with the figure of the unconsoled, while at the same time placing the spectators in a position where they could become a sort of consoler, or something along those lines. […] We also worked on a slightly stretched temporality, to give the eye time to look at Roger Sala Reyner’s body in an almost medical way: in all its details, right down to the inner circulation of his movements.

Text and interview by Olivier Hespel.

Press release

Although solo, Roger is not without a surge of extreme power: that of a sonic submersion of telluric infrabasses, rumbling through the auditorium even before the spectators have taken their seats. This is not the only complexity worked into the stage-audience relationship. A limited number of spectators are seated on a tier facing one of the corners at the back of the stage. They are very close to performer Roger Sala Reyner. It’s worth noting that he is one of the three co-writers of the piece, alongside dancer-choreographer Guillaume Marie and playwright Igor Dobricic. This is no mean feat: we’d just come out of Pierre Pontvianne’s piece, almost scandalized that it wasn’t co-written by its “interpreter” (Marthe Krummenacher, who carries and lifts everything from the stage). Back to Roger, Sala Reyner, who has already taken his place at this corner, at the atomic heart of sonic chaos, where his body seems a realm of silence. The seating arrangement, facing the corner he occupies, as if with no way out, makes us feel – though this is too often forgotten – the physical materiality of the pressure exerted by an amassed audience on an artist who exposes himself, alone and head-on.

From this point onwards, Roger can be perceived in the daylight of choreographic radicalities that superbly wring out a physical and spatial principle, and not two, modulated over time. In this case, the principle is that the base of the dance is compressed into the hollow and bottom of a strict right angle of two adjoining walls. The artist may even seem to collapse here, as if engulfed to the ground. A thick canvas of despondency is woven. And yet it provides a support, a rear base, for every attempt at three-dimensional life that stubbornly pursues, elaborates and tears itself away. There’s thrust, counter-thrust, buttress, body arch, projection, shaking and recovery. A kind of paradoxical counter-balancing, as if in a tackle. The artist’s body is frail, his complexion pale, drenched in perspiration, his clothes poor to the point of fraying, his legs almost shaky in heavy shoes. Efflanqué. Pilgrim. Sacrificial. Eyes misted with tears. Christ-like. Or Franciscan of Assisi (and Assisi?). The presence is overwhelming, but it seemed to us, over time, as if we had to sacrifice to the absolute monastic rule of sixty minutes required for any required performance, it seemed to us that it was as if to fill the time, that the accent of an expressionist theatricality came to take over from the bodily purity.

Guillaume Marie makes no secret of his desire to rehabilitate an aesthetic based on shared emotion. And Roger Sala Reyner is as much an actor as a dancer. The comment we have just made is therefore perfectly coherent. But not without having blunted some of our concentration (in all choreographic intransigence).

Gérard Mayen Danser Canal Historique

(…) In a much smaller space, ROGER, by Guillaume Marie, Igor Dobricic and Roger Sala Reyner, condenses the tonicity of the spectators arranged around him, in the promiscuity of an arc of a circle. The solo, the first in a series of “allegories of consolation” – in this case, that of the disconsolate – takes place in the corner of a room in the Musée d’Uzès. Dressed in a fleece jacket, shorts and sneakers, performer Roger Sala Reyner gazes at us glassily, his watery eyes barely half-open, as if turned inwards. The temperature of the light around him oscillates between brilliant, icy-white beams and warmer layers of clarity. These are interspersed with complete darkness; the performer too, like a black hole, seems to absorb the sound waves that ricochet off the walls and concentrate in the corner he occupies.

The vibrations animate him and initiate a slow exploration of the wall: when he encounters it, his fingers bend and settle on it, palms embracing its asperities. He seems to be sucked into it, bending his back to define its angle, and sinking into its relief to absorb its properties of solidity and angularity: the edges of the wall resonate with the flexion of his joints, initiating relentlessly perpendicular falls. The distribution of support and muscular tension defies a constantly replayed gravity: lying on his side, he seems to be drawn to the wall like a magnet, pressing himself against it. The wall that attracts and supports him also becomes a sounding board, echoing his inaudible songs, murmurs distorted by the head buried in the corner. Furtive, pleading echolalia resonate from behind her ribcage. The half-naked figure, out of breath and sweating, her back lacerated with red streaks, seems painfully cornered, and the body, as if hollowed out by this hour of confinement, makes perceptible the internal circulation of her movements as she struggles against these opposing polarities.

Céline Gauthier, Ma Culture, 03/07/2019