Out of Joint / Partita 1

According to Freud, human beings “decided” to walk upright. The birth of culture is then supposed to be due to this vertical position. But what would happen if humans gave up this reference point – this axis point for thinking at all? What would it mean to lie, to stand, to walk, to dance, without recourse to the (over)view arising from this verticality?  

Starting form this question, this new work by Laurent Chétouane examines the possibility of a different relationship to the body, to the other, to space and to the environment: a new orientation for exposed and fragile bodies who, in their fragility and borrowing from Judith Butler’s concept of “vulnerability,” experience the core of humanity beyond stable identities.
In the first part, three dancers share a “choreographed practice” of this horizontal body with the audience. While standing, the spectators find themselves in the midst of things, experiencing the main coordinates of this dance: the floor, hearing, falling. In the second part the bodies, inspired and accompanied by Bach’s “Partita Nr. 1” (in B minor for solo violin), try out various constellations of being together – among themselves and together with the violinist. A utopian possibility begins between the audience and the performers, the possibility of a “community of the vulnerable”.