Boris Charmatz & Dimitri Chamblas

In 1992, when Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas had just left the conservatory, they burst onto the choreographic scene by presenting À bras-le-corps. This piece requires from their bodies a huge expenditure of energy, contrasting with the codes of the time. As Dimitri Chamblas explained: the point for them was to explore what it was possible to do “without a framework, without masters”, and to “show everything they had been taught to hide”; testing out limits, borderlines, overexposing bodies, fatigue, breathing, by confronting their presences with that of the audience. The spectators, spread out in a square around the dancers, see and hear everything: the hammering of feet, recovery times, shocks, frictions between flesh, the skin that starts to heat up, then to gleam, and then to drip beneath Yves Godin’s lighting. This proximity allows for zooms and the tightening of focuses on a contact, or a moment of hesitation: how one hand takes another hand, how one hand takes a thigh, how the bodies separate then join back up. À bras-le-corps, a physical, athletic object, conceived for their bodies as young dancers, could have come to a stop when Dimitri Chamblas took a break in his career as a performer. Instead, they have decided once again to test their organisms against this dance and exhaustion, and to see what these gestures still have to say, today. Now that À bras-le-corps has entered the repertory of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, they have entrusted this dynamic writing to young performers who will, in turn, confront it with their fervour with it while throwing all their vigour into it.