Boris Charmatz: enfant

SOLD OUT at the moment. Performances by other choreographers at Ruhrtriennale 2012: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel/Theater HORA, Mathilde Monnier, Jan Lauwers/Needcompany

›Child‹ is the title of this celebrated dance piece by French choreographer Boris Charmatz. With this work on the awakening of childhood, he has succeeded in creating a wonderful piece that begins with an eerie machine dance and ends almost rambunctiously.

Children run about, shaking, singing, jumping, and frolicking, catapulting themselves out of a beautifully sad experiment in which tenderness and dedication, powerlessness and subject lie dangerously close to one another. Almost unnoticed, they take power - power over themselves, over the adults that they set in motion, and over the spectators, who are invited to become children once again.

enfant is one of the most intense, most moving dance performances of the new century. The performance was a highlight at last year's Festival d'Avignon. Silently and rigorously, it forces our attention onto our relation to the essence of the child. What, Charmatz asks, has happened to our view of children?

Musée de la danse is today a museum in progress, a platform and impulse provider for new developments on the international dance scene.