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).

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