Histoires sans histoire(s) is an intercalation of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s For Four Walls and Merce Cunnigham’s Fabrications and Sounddance, staged at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais de Chaillot) as part of the Festival d’Automne’s celebration of the centenary of the celebrated choreographer’s birth. Jacobsson and Calley are co-directors of the Ballet de Lorraine.
Whatever Fabrications and Sounddance may say about Cunningham’s genius, Histoires certainly is (yet another) proof of the Ballet de Lorraine’s excellence as re-creator of old stories and creator of new ones.
For Four Walls opens the old story: Fabrications and Sounddance follow. With 24 performers dancing within mirrors that double and triple or quadruple movement, with pianist Vanessa Wagner perched over a single grand set two-thirds off-center stage flawlessly executing John Cage’s pure chord within a single sound, the company re-creates the “lost” content of Cunningham’s Four Walls, creating Histoires sans histoire(s). They put up a mirror where by looking straight ahead onlookers also see what is behind.
The arrangement makes Histoires work visually and psychically as a palimpsest does, showing everything all at once but also as single units, as if each thing were written on distinct, separated surface. Just as with a palimpsest, despite a saturation of apparently random positions of words and ideas, the eye and brain always know where they are as the spirit explores the potentials.
In the mirror Histoires holds up, I saw that the recursive palimpsest of Fabrications and the chaotic sensuality of Sounddance are not meant only as a questioning of dance forms. They are also as a statement of physical or psychic truth. And looking in the mirror provided by Jacobsson and Caley, I could see and feel the newness that is Cunningham play out. I could see how he empowered me as onlooker to create or “find” for myself the infinite filigrees of sense in the art of human movement: to create my personal palimpsest of Cunningham's famous 64 underlying figures (by coincidence the same number of underlying figures as the I Ching).
And, as the remarkably talented dance performers of the Ballet de Lorraine in the mirror before me sprang for themselves, sprang for and with each other, moved apart from and towards, through, to, one another, sprang inside themselves, as I gave these doubling men and women a pattern, as they gave each other and themselves a pattern, I felt absolutely certain that “random”, “recursion”, “synchronicity”, “dissociation”, “association”, “coincidence” are all the same damned thing, all as solidly linked and as eternally true as any reality that I can kick. I swear that I texted that to a friend while still sitting gazing at the empty stage where Histoires sans histoires had been.
Histoires sans histoire(s), was created as part of the Festival d’Automne 2019 Merce Cunningham Centenary celebration and produced jointly by the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, Théâtre National de la Danse-Chaillot, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Festival d’Automne à Paris. It was staged for the first time from 12-16 October 2019 with the usual technical-esthetic verve of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.
