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Dimitri Chamblas, Kim Gordon
takemehome
takemehome was born in Los Angeles, from the long hours that Dimitri Chamblas spent driving at night on his way back from a high-security prison located outside Hollywood where he teaches. Like the major metropolises of the world, LA has eliminated pedestrian traffic and with it, the misery and the underworld population that accompanied it.
To the rhythm of the soundtrack composed from Kim Gordon - bassist, guitarist and vocalist of the alternative-rock band Sonic Youth, "one of the boldest women in rock" as The New Yorker calls her - the dancers move like silhouettes emerging and disappearing, elusive but familiar, intertwined and interdependent. At the crossroads of power and resignation, they are the forgotten people of the great metropolises, prisoners or the elderly, unproductive, neglected, undecided ghosts.
takemehome gathers a team of nine dancers met on different continents, continues the dialogue already begun with the artist and musician Kim Gordon, and invites Yves Godin to invent a lighting device. Dimitri Chamblas has chosen to set aside the certainty of composition that would highlight virtuosity, and to trust the performers instead. For each one of them possesses considerable knowledge of the stage that allows for all postures, from silence to excess. The whole thing takes place in a joyful twilight and, as is the case when children play at scaring each other in a dimly lit room, the shadows project another world as grotesque as it is disturbing.
The dancers circulate in different states, exchange gestures in an almost organic way and, with five electric guitars, they take shape under a luminous zeppelin for dance escapes, before disappearing, temporarily swallowed by the darkness. <br>
Dressed in dark clothing, these shadowy extras brought back to anonymity reveal themselves to be as energetic as they are melancholic, evoking a forgotten world and perhaps the traces of a happiness that has been erased. Beauty emerges from the beyond black, one must go through these nuances for the show to tend towards an ode to the forgotten shadows of the great metropolises.Kim Gordon's score accompanies the vital impulse that the performers give off on stage. Armed with electric guitars, they fear neither feedback nor disappearance to create a community that intends to put up a fight before slipping away to an elsewhere.
choreography Dimitri Chamblas
music Kim Gordon
with Marion Barbeau, Marissa Brown, Eli Cohen, Bryana Fritz, Eva Galmel, François Malbranque, Jobel Medina, Salia Sanou, Kensaku Shinohara
Yves Godin lights in collaboration with Virginie Mira in devising the device
stage manager Jack McWeeny
lighting technician Iannis Japiot
sound technician Dimitri Dedonder
costumes Dimitri Chamblas, Andrealisse Lopez
production and distribution Studio Dimitri Chamblas
studio manager Elodie Vitrano
production assistant Natalia Góngora
co-production Charleroi danse - Centre chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles; Montpellier Danse as part of residency at Agora, cité internationale de la danse, with support from BNP Paribas Foundation; Liquid Music Minneapolis; The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance California Institute of the Arts
takemehome is part of the Albertine Dance Season and has received support from Villa Albertine
with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
Studio Dimitri Chamblas is subsidized by the Ministry of Culture - Direction Générale de la Création Artistique and the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Occitanie
INFORMATION
Holders of one or more tickets for the shows staged at Teatro Romano can pick up a corresponding number of tickets for free admission to the National Archaeological Museum and Teatro romano in Spoleto at:
- Festival Box Office & Merchandising via Saffi, 12 - open daily 10am-1pm/15pm-6pm, from June 24 at 10am-7pm
- Festival Box Office Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti via Vaita Sant'Andrea, 10 - open from June 28 daily 10 a.m.-1 p.m.-4 p.m.
- Spoleto Festival Information Point Piazza della Libertà - open from June 28 daily 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. - 6 p.m.
- Theater ticket offices open to leave from one hour before the start of performances
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Please be advised that dates and times may be subject to change.
See www.festivaldispoleto.com for updates.
The chimera of return: takemehome by Dimitri Chamblas and Kim Gordon
Text by StefanoTomassini
"I think these lives
are not finished,
That nothing is finished,
I read and reread these names, write, rewrite, question: three hundred years later I answer."
Pedro Eiras
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It is the chimera of a route, a path back to the visible, to the living, perhaps even to happiness. And it happens in real time, like the necessity that generates it. The title of the performance alludes to it, certainly, and clearly, explicitly (words sent in the handwriting that renounces spaces). But the fallout of this itinerary is more intertwined with what derails it: shadows and ghosts, sounds and distances, forces full of darkness and the violence of being made invisible. Italian-English writer Daniela Cascella teaches us that that of the chimera is a restless space, where there seems to be little from to say because it is all too difficult from to articulate (Chimeras, 2022). What is needed then is a composite and impure world of forms, requiring resonances and interferences: this is perhaps just what to Dimitri Chamblas needed to create takemehome, together to nine performers and Kim Gordon's electric and noise suggestions.
The choreographer, who lives between France and California and to Los Angeles has done a project with prisoners, believes deeply in dance as an accelerator of social cohesion. Even in a context of confinement such as a maximum-security prison, theagency of touching and movement, of taking on the presence and burden of the other, revealed an existential and communal condition not too different from from that outside the prison institution. Thus takemehome was born. Observing how among the asphalt that floods our dimly lit cities sometimes emerge ghosts and strange nocturnal creatures equally imprisoned in a world that excludes and distances: for Chamblas, it is then necessary to be able to choose between fear or acceptance. These ghosts, who are forgotten figures, outcasts and on the margins of the city, out of productive time and far from the spaces of profit because they come from from a world of dispossession and unreality, live by the force that drives them to us: as a real repressed state of being.
The nine performers, who hail from from different continents (among them, Marion Barbeau, prima ballerina atOpera in Paris, and Salia Sanou, a choreographer from Burkina Faso in West Africa), and are also of different generations as well as movement styles, act and move in the performance space as shadows that demand attention, as presences on the edge of the visible that continually play with disappearance. The movement sequences are often at high speed, thus requiring the highest level of attention and preparation: a quality of execution in speed that, however, cannot risk imprecise or blurred gestures. Stillness, silence, sudden and arrhythmic actions, strong breaths, rapid runs, leaps and pours of the torso backward, then twisted spins on the ground, and again suspended poses: all, in breathless attention, in a fluidity without rules. The one intended and choreographed from Chamblas is a guarded body. As well as shadowy, spectral.
Five electric guitars (and five amplifiers moved to the stage) flood the space of this nocturnal otherness with a magma of frantic looping sounds and noises that literally give body to the darkness. But they are also able to create a kind of virtual community that meets in the invisible and reminds us how it is possible to create spaces of imagination in which any encounter is possible beyond ordinary presence, socially expected recognition. The viewer here must recognize, feeling, anything but.
The performance arises from a profound sense of the limitations through which we construct our social relationships, and an awareness that every compositional process in some way risks replicating the same mechanisms. In this respect, the device of lights devised from Yves Godin culminates in a suspended inflatable light-generating zeppelin, seemingly very light but also very much like to a control and surveillance device. A moving object of light that aims to to overcome these limits and to illuminate alternative spaces, always nomadic and always further, in which darkness and gloom are but means, tools to disposition of light, never their rejection, their negation. Darkness is thus a further possibility for light to have its say, beyond isolation, beyond emergence of any nature, and to imagine new worlds on the contrary.
Here is a new chimera that appears because it is capable of showing through the most ungoverned silence or noise, "another world as grotesque as it is disturbing." Just as even the extreme actions of the performers, which might seem avulsed or abstract from a truer context of meaning, can always be traced to personal stories, to instantaneous everyday happenings and to incredibly precise moments of each person's life, but which to the viewer must remain inaccessible as a whole. For it is part of the choreographer's process of observation, creation and composition. On stage they are in fact transmuted and transfigured into an anonymity of action full of melancholy. In his presentation of the work, Dimitri Chamblas also alludes, for the actions of these restless nine black-clad figures, to of the "tracks of an erased happiness."
Like unexpected dancing silhouettes appearing in the night along the streets of a major metropolis, they emerge beyond the blackness carrying an idea of nuanced beauty, and then a hymn to the forgotten shadows of big cities seems to compose itself. The incredible encounter between Kim Gordon's harsh sonorities and Dimitri Chamblas' complex movement culture happened by chance: in an art gallery of a mutual friend, who thought for (and made to available to to) them an improvisational space in front of to an audience but without any prior writing. The performance event then turned into a full-fledged duet(Duet, now also visible on YouTube in the version for MOCA Los Angeles). Subsequently, Benjamin Millepied proposed to Chamblas to choreograph for his company LA Dance Project giving him the opportunity to continue to working with Kim Gordon. This was the beginning of the creative process of what is now takemehome. Finally, it only remains to recall the extreme versatility and breadth of curiosities of Chamblas, who studied ballet at the School of Ballet atOpera in Paris, and who works alongside large and important brands such as Chanel, while personally overseeing experimental pedagogical projects as he prepares the staging of Crowd out - anopera by David Lang staged for 1.000 voices in a 3,500-seat theater, which will take place during this year's Paris Olympics, no less than another work in 2024, which involved 50 people bubbling water from their mouths to create an immense human fountain. A final chimera: body and soul of a new ecosystem.
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From the À bras-le-corps duo created with Boris Charmatz in 1993 to the one with Kim Gordon in 2018, Dimitri Chamblas's career reflects an interest in encounters that never stops developing. He has collaborated with William Forsythe, Benjamin Millepied, Mathilde Monnier, Salia Sanou, photographer and director Alex Prager, and fashion designer Virginie Viard. He created the 3e Scène at the Opéra National de Paris, then became Dean of the Faculty of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Dimitri Chamblas defines his own cartography of creation by moving dance to unconventional places, such as inside maximum security prisons, as evidenced by Manuela Dalle's documentary Dancing in to -Yard. Today it is through his Studio that he develops his projects: takemehome, a work for nine performers in collaboration with Kim Gordon, the staging of Crowd Out, a'opera for a thousand voices by David Lang, or Slow Show, a performance for fifty participants that slows down time and brings to life to an installation of the same name composed from a series of video portraits. Dancer, teacher, choreographer and artistic director, dance is Dimitri Chamblas' driving force between the United States and France.
Kim Gordon is a visual artist, writer and co-founder of experimental post-punk rock band Sonic Youth. In 2012, Gordon formed Body/Head with Bill Nace, together they released two albums: Coming Apart in 2013 and The Switch in 2018. In parallel, she continued her work as a visual artist and was showcased in various museums with exhibitions such as She Bites Her Tender Mind presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and Lo-Fi Glamour at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and at the Museum In Ballpark in Lucerne, Switzerland. Gordon is also author of two memoirs, Girl in a Band and No Icon, and has co-edited an essay on music, This Woman's work, with Irish writer Sinead Gleason.
In 2019, she released her first solo album, No Home Record. That same year, she met Dimitri Chamblas, and together they began experimenting with music & dance, resulting in a duo and then collective pieces. In March 2024, Kim Gordon released her second solo album, The Collective.
Marion Barbeau
Marion Barbeau is a French dancer born in 1991. She studied dance at the Paris Opera Ballet school before joining the company in 2008 where she climbed up the hierarchy and became a first soloist in 2018. In 2016, she received the Arop award for the best dancer. As a member of the ballet, she performed soloist roles in ballets and neo-classical pieces and collaborated with choreographers such as Hofesch Shechter, Ohad Naharin, Sharon Eyal, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Crystal Pite. She was chosen by Cédric Klapisch for the lead role in his film Rise, released 2022, and then nominated best female newcomer by the Académie des César. She stars in Baptiste Debraux's first feature film, Un homme en fuite, and Simon Bouisson's Drone, both scheduled for release in 2024. Currently, she is working with choreographer Laura Bachman on the piece Ne me touchez pas.
Marissa Brown
Marissa Brown holds a BFA in Performance and Choreography from the University of California Irvine and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Marissa performed in the Broadway version of Ivo Van Hove's West Side Story, and has had the pleasure of working with choreographers and companies such as L.A. Dance Project, Donald McKayle, Benjamin Levy, Sharp & Fine, The Park Avenue Armory, and Phantom Limb Company. She also creates her own dance and film works under the name Lone King Projects.<br>
Eli Cohen
Eli Cohen was born in Spain and grew up in Israel, where she worked with the Kibbutz 2 dance company until 2012. Since 2013, she has been living in Berlin and working as a dancer both in the Berlin freelance scene and internationally. In recent years she has collaborated with Boris Nikitin, Lisi Estaras, Boris Charmatz, Sebastian Matthias, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sergiu Matis, Edan Gorlicki, amongst others and regularly collaborates with choreographers Marina Mascarell and Lee Méir with whom she works as a choreographic assistant.
Bryana Fritz
Bryana Fritz is a choreographer, dancer, and author. Her work lies at the intersection of literature and performance and is inspired by an ongoing interest in medieval women's writing and history, fanfiction, and collective reading/writing practices. Fritz has worked as a dancer for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz and Michiel Vandevelde. Since 2016, she has also been collaborating with Henry Andersen under the name Slow Reading Club.
Eva Galmel
Born and raised in Paris, France, Eva Galmel began her dance training at nine with Monique Servaes. In 2012, she joined the School of the Paris Opera Ballet under Elisabeth Platel where she performed works by Rudolf Nureyev, Pierre Lacotte, and Jose Martinez. She toured Moscow and danced at the Bolshoï with the Paris Opera Ballet’s production of Paquita. In 2019, she joined the Rudra Bejart school in Lausanne, then returned to Paris for her master's at the CNSMDP, graduating in 2022. During her studies, she interned with LA Dance Project and later danced in Romeo & Juliet Suite with LADP on a European tour. She also has performed at Segerstrom Center for the Arts and participated in the Vail Dance Festival.<br>
François Malbranque
François Malbranque discovered dance by practicing Polish folkloric dance. After attending the Conservatoire Régional de Lille, François entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. In 2021, he obtained his diploma in Contemporary Dance and a degree in Performing Arts. Performer for Boris Charmatz, he has also started personal choreographic works and has collaborated in the lighting design for different performances.
Jobel Medina
Jobel Medina is a Los Angeles-based stage and film choreographer and dancer recognized for his projects: Kill The Monsters at MOCA (2022) and David, My Goliath at REDCAT (2021). As a dancer and collaborator, Jobel has toured with Ate9 Dance Company (2017-2022), YC Studio (2017-2018) and performed works by Tino Sehgal, Simon Mcburney, Christopher Bordenave, Shahar Binyamini, Tom Weinberger. His recent projects include Infinite Rehearsal at ICALA Museum, movement direction for Alex Prager’s California, Benjamin Millepied’s Grace, Heidi Duckler Dance artist in residence, and Sundance commercial film. He has appeared in commercials as well as in multiple music videos. Jobel received his Masters in Fine Arts at the California Institute of The Arts and has taught movement workshops at multiple universities in the United States.
Salia Sanou
Salia Sanou was born in Burkina Faso, he then studied theater and African dance before joining Mathilde Monnier's company in 1993. In 2011 he creates his own company, Mouvements Perpétuels, and produces numerous pieces, including Au-delà des frontières (2012), Clameur des arènes (2014), Doubaley ou le miroir (2013), Multiple-s (2018), D’un rêve (2021), Papa Tambour (2021), À nos combats (2023), and De Fugues... en Suites… (2024). In 2016, he conceives Du Désir d'horizons (2016), following workshops he conducted for three years in refugee camps in Burkina Faso and Burundi. With Seydou Boro, he founds the Biennial Dialogues de Corps in Ouagadougou as well as La Termitière, a choreographic development center that opened its doors in 2006.
Kensaku Shinohara
Born in Sapporo, Japan, Shinohara discovered dance in 2004 while studying anthropology in Tokyo. After touring as a performer, he moved to the US in 2009 to further choreographic research. Through movement and soundscape creation, his work challenges social hierarchy and systems of exclusion/power, inviting the disruption of the audience’s comfort. His works have been presented around NYC; elsewhere in the USA (LA, San Francisco, Tucson, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh); and internationally. Shinohara is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 92Y Harkness Dance Center AIR, Queens Arts Fund, Japan Foundation New York.
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Mehdi Kerkouche
Yoann Bourgeois
Hania Rani
Wayne McGregor
