Yoann Bourgeois
lies in the dance the anatomy of my fall
By Anna Bandettini - The friday
The artist, a social and visualization star with shows that choreograph defiance to gravity, returns to Festival dei Due Mondi with new work Memory of to Fall: "What a blessing to have attended the circus."
It will be hard to resist the trembling, the sense of vertigo but also the wonder that this incredible artist inspires when he dances on dangerously inclined revolving platforms, or when he falls from the steps of a staircase without a railing and immediately comes back up, as if without gravity. Daredevil, concrete, poetic, Yoann Bourgeois, French acrobat and choreographer, experiences dance as falling, instability, disequilibrium. "My goal is to discover the unheard of," he says, and so he has won not only thousands of followers on Instagram and millions of views on social media with the works Fugue/Trampoline (2008) and Celui qui tombe (2014), but also fashion (Vuitton) and rock-pop stars, from Coldplay to Selena Gomez, Harry Styles whom he has made dance in various videos, including Marco Mengoni for whom he signed the Eurovision 2023 performance.
Bourgeois' latest creation is titled Memory of to Fall and makes its debut on July 6 at piazza Duomo to Spoleto, where he has already been a guest in past years, also at Festival dei Due Mondi. "This show," explains Yoann, 42, alongside his wife Marie, who is an artist with the company founded in 2010, "was born out of a meeting with composer Hania Rani. We had an exchange during Milan Fashion Week last September and I immediately felt the aesthetic potential that connected our two worlds. Hania, from Poland, is an insatiable artist whose aesthetic hybridity is singular: timeless, hypnotic, but with a sense of musicality that makes her popular. For Memory of to fall, she sings, uses pianos, electronics, and acoustics for a minimalist composition à la Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but with more melody. It is an experience, and I think ours is first and foremost a metaphysical encounter.
The performance, however, is very physical. What is it about?
"Every work of mine stems from the stage device that guides us to new physicality, new relationships between us. Here is a massive horizontal structure that I designed like all the others, and it curves and becomes vertical up to 6 meters high. from there the ten dancers drop. The choreography is built on this movement. Why? The fall is directly related to gravity, which is the drama of the universe. Gravity pushes toward the abyss, and it is a bit of a death. My work seeks an alternative, through what I call the unreachable suspension point."
And what is it?
A crossroads, the instantaneous, absolute moment when weight disappears. It is the body in which the intensity vibrates, the quality of presence that allows one to resist gravity, if only for an instant. It is a moment of resistance to death, a small window open to eternity that does not mean immortality, because the pyramids of Egypt, for example, are eternal but sooner or later they will turn to dust. In this, mine is an existential quest before an artistic one."
Do you train a lot for this?
"No, there is no real training. I practice hiking. And more than dance, I am attracted to extreme sports."
Are its roots in circus arts?
"I was, I think, the only student to attending circus school and dance school at the same time. My relationship with the circus is a long story. When I was a child, my parents separated and sold the house to Le Cirque Plume, the group that gave birth to the Nouveau Cirque. from there, circus was perhaps a way to not lose the child I was, to put play at the center of my life. Circus made me realize that all disciplines contribute to the nameless art, which is the most beautiful of all: the art of living."
Were you inspired to by anyone for this artistic "philosophy"?
"My first reference is the wonderful wonder of contemplating nature. The mountains, and when I say mountains I mean their disproportionality. I live among the peaks of the Chartreuse massif in the French Alps, and there you have the feeling that everything around us is not to human scale, it's an unheard of space. It is poetry that helps you to breathe."
And what place do social media have in this poem?
"I just frequent Instagram as a small laboratory to experiment with videos. I know I have a lot of followers-I don't seek them out, but with the artificialization of reality, people want to reconnect with their feelings. And our work I hope produces that."
Is it the same with music? How did it go with Mengoni?
"I didn't want my work to stay in a small box. And rock has a wide audience of young people. I was sought out from various musicians, including from Marco who is a really passionate person, eager to perform and communicate."
She also seems to have this same passion.
"I see the world changing fast and I want to do my part, with passion. We need to give answers to our irresponsibility toward the environment, and art that transforms imaginaries is a first step to change. When we talk about ecological issues, we often do so from a narrow perspective only. I think that in order to change, we should, without being afraid to use the word, sacralize our relationship with nature and humanity. That's what I want to say with my work."