There’s a fin de siècle schadenfreude in our air du temps. YouTube spiritualists see souls fleeing the coming travails of those still earthbound.
But the frisson that comes when the past becomes the past while the future rustles someplace in the shadows doesn’t have to be one of apprehensive nostalgia or of excitable fortune-telling. At least, not for contemporary dance performance.
And certainly not for Christophe Martin, founder and director of Paris' annual Faits d’Hiver winter dance performance festival. He looks at the present, it seems to me, as the operating system and the past as an upgrade.
Noting that contemporary dance is now 60 years old and that it’s never too late to do something well, Martin announced last year that, for the first time in its history, Faits d’Hiver would have a theme: memory and remembrance. Twenty-twenty-five marks the festival's 27th edition.
“Why bother to remember the past,” Christophe Martin writes in his introduction to 2025 program, “If not to restart the present, wonder about it, and – why not? – revive it? The work on Notre Dame shows how much restoring something requires adapting to the moment and discovery.”
Memory, then, marks a dance artefact: a title, persons, places and sounds, along with, sometimes, choreographic notations, visual evidence, and/or community memory. Dominique Bagouet’s Nécessito, piece pour Grenade comes to mind. Likely as true for classic Swan Lake as for contemporary Nécessito, Bagouet viewed experience as the primary vector of dance performance: a performance, like an individual, is a singularity within a complex genealogy.
For contemporary dance performance (and maybe for classic and modern dance, too) remembrance is both stitching together and reverse engineering memory (or repertory). “… The issue goes well beyond [memory] to techniques, themes, evolutions…” Martin observes. “And all the rest of what we call contemporary-ness in dance performance needs continuous airing... Creation, re-creation, reprises, re-discoveries, homages and historic revivals are rich soils for an iteration of today’s choreographic concerns (and reflections of our society’s concerns, too)”.
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Faits d’Hiver 27th edition, Choreographers and Performances, 20 January - 15 February 2025
Dance performances take place in 20 venues in Paris and its near suburbs. A slash (“/”) between names indicates a collaborative work. “Re-creation” indicates a work in repertory; “Creation” indicates a premier.
Emmanuel Eggermont • About Love and Death, elegy for Raimund Hoghe …Jean-Claude Gallotta / Josette Baïz • Ulysse, re-creation ... Aurélie Berland / Christine Gérard • Automnales, Nu perdu, La Griffe, re-creation ... Raphaël Cottin • L’Éloge des possibles, creation ... Nathalie Pernette • Wakan - Un Souffle … Betty Tchomanga • Histoire(s) Décoloniales (Portraits croisés), creation ... Odile Duboc / Léo Lérus / Ioannis Mandafounis, and Ensemble chorégraphique du CNSMDP (Paris Conservatory) • Panorama danse, creation ... Carole Bordes • GIANTS, creation ... Geisha Fontaine & Pierre Cottreau • Ne faites pas la moue #1 ... Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté • Les nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien .... Elodie Sicard • les Aspirants, creation... Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar • Love Chapter 2, creation … Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King • Losing it ... Bilaka • iLaUNA ... Thomas Lebrun / Bernard Glandier / Christine Bastin • 1998 … Perrine Valli • Kantik … Groupe FLUO / Benoit Canteteau • FOSSIL miniature (in situ format) ... Daniela Clementina De Lauri • LE FAS_BE, creation .... Sylvie Pabiot • Mes autres ... Structure-couple • L’Été … Tom Grand Mourcel • Solus Break … Maëva Lamolière • Looking for Carlotta and Yumi Fujitani / Naomi Mutoh • Hommage à Carlotta Ikeda, creation…
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