Seeing the premiere of Jann Gallois’ Quintette – "Quintet" – at the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson this past December put me in mind of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels for kids. That’s because, one summer day, on the way out to play, my son idly plucked up a dusty copy of one of the adventures from a musty shelf, opened the cover and immediately plopped down on the floor, utterly absorbed. His absorption pretty much represents my reaction to the piece, which will feature at the end of March, beginning of April 2018, at the Théâtre National de Chaillot.
My appreciation comes down to this: the emotions raised by Gallois’ choreographic argument become, in effect, the choreography of the piece. She aligns choreography closely to ordinary relational movement (the fruit, I guess, of being literate in hip-hop and contemporary dance performance). Her approach holds together as performance because it focuses on the precision of the expression of movement rather than on the movement itself.
The five performers use a sort of gestural tool kit – desire (for the other/for recognition by the other), power, position, trust, affection – to build firm symmetries of emotional call & response. Just as soon as any of a symmetry’s facets push too hard on any other or the negative or positive distance between one body and another slips out of sync, the whole symmetry dissolves into a fluid of searching bodies.
So, technically, Quintette does exactly what Gallois told me it would during an interview summer last, when she was creating it.
In the image of the 2016 trio-performance Carte Blanche, Quintette tests the capacity of human bodies to synchronize.
But, much more to the point for me, like Compact, the piece that brought Gallois to my notice, Quintette opens up emotions that sweep the spectator along and, at the end, leaves him or her wondering about the nature of people rather than of the bricks and mortar of choreography.
I am not the only one to feel more than see Gallois’ choreography.
I first saw Compact in the course of the month-long Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis dance-performance festival a couple of years ago.
The guy squinched up against me on the hard concrete bleacher-like seat in the steam-cooker of a performance space we were parked in nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. He asked, hoarsely, I swear, whether I’d ever seen Gallois perform. When I said I hadn’t, he slapped his forehead and said the equivalent of Golly! Are you in for a treat!
“This crazy man is surely a relative,” is what I told myself at the time. He was so rigidly attentive as the piece opened that I thought I had every reason to believe I was in for a little neighborly crazy-man catalepsy.
But, no. I was soon totally absorbed myself. And, later in the year, when I brought Karine to see Compact – Karine, who brims with common sense, is my reality tester – squeezed my hand meaningfully during the performance.
So, now, after Quintette, if you ask me about Jann Gallois, I confidently slap my forehead, too, and say Golly! even if my manners remain good enough that I’d never dream of nudging your ribs with my elbow.
Choreography : Jann Gallois – Performers : Maria Fonseca, Jann Gallois, Erik Lobelius, Amaury Réot, Aure Wachter – Music : Alexandre Bouvier, Grégoire Simon – Lighting: Cyril Mulon – Costumes : Marie-Cécile Viault
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