Boris Charmatz: manger

“Watching people as they eat is a strange form of aesthetic observation, an act with an almost monstrous quality. Dance is virtually fixated on the ideal of a fragile, hovering body. A subject that at first glance is as ‘simple’ as it is rich in formal, conceptual possibilities. The result is a contradiction that I like great deal. Eating is entirely unspectacular, an almost invisible process. At the same time, eating can also quickly seem demonstrative and symbolically charged: greedily devouring, spilling food all over oneself, stuffing oneself to death as in the film The Big Feast, or eating a banana and emphasizing the sexual connotations involved. The banal, very mundane act of eating has until now rarely been treated choreographically. At root it is about making things disappear. It is a more a process of disappearance than one of showing or performing.” Boris Charmatz

As most recently in his masterpieces enfant and Levée des conflits, French dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz subverts expectations and formal laws, breaking with routines and expanding the choreographic space. In manger, he focuses on a timeless and yet very topical subject: eating. In his new performance, Boris Charmatz poses the question of how we digest reality.

Dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz, born in Chambéry, France in 1973, repeatedly explores links between dance and visual art and philosophy. In 2009, he took on the artistic directorship of Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne, declaring the institution a museum for dance. Musée de la danse is today a “museum in progress,” a platform and source of inspiration for new developments in the international dance world. 

Alongside dance performances that tour around the world, Charmatz has also developed experimental exhibition formats. With his live exhibition expo zéro, he was a guest at Springdance, Utrecht (2010) and Performa 11 in New York (2011). In 2012 he was co-curator of the exhibition Moments: Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten (ZKM Karlsruhe). In November 2013, New York’s MoMA presented several works by Boris Charmatz in a three-week show entitled Three Collective Gestures. Ruhrtriennale 2014 will show the premiere this new piece and the film Levée; Musée de la danse used the concentrated situation and brutal surface of Halde Haniel to make the film version of their dance piece Levée des conflits.