Muette

Following SOMNOLE – a whistled solo, suspended on the tip of the tongue, presented at the Festival d’Automne in 2021 – Boris Charmatz continues his work on the edge of breath, carving out a path for a dance imbued with textured silence. In Muette, his body seeks to express what language cannot say, allowing a flood of emotions to rise to the surface of his face and skin, reflecting the shocks of the outside world. Standing speechless in the face of the uncertainties of an unspeakable reality. Faced with the impossibility of articulating a word or a sentence, Boris Charmatz has sought to formulate a dance held back at the edge of breath: a silent dance, as fragile as a bubble of saliva, carrying a profusion of tensions, knots, and surges. In this stripped-down solo, the mouth and face form the nerve center around which the body takes on various states; like a seismograph, his dance gives form to a magma of sensations, making the skin vibrate like a membrane, sensitive to the slightest variations. Inside and outside intertwine, bringing to the surface an invisible boundary – the dividing line between intimate disorder and the clamor of the world. Between suspended moments and a profusion of movements, Muette choreographs a long minute of silence, reaching toward the search for an inner calm.

Boris Charmatz

As a dancer and choreographer, Boris Charmatz puts dance to the test of formal constraints that redefine its range of possibilities. He uses the stage as a draft for embodying concepts, amplifying voices and intensifying body perception, as in 10000 gestes and Liberté Cathédrale. Through experimental projects such as Bocal and Musée de la danse, he has created concentrates of collective experience that redefine the relationship with the public, the urban space and the choreographic repertoire – a multi-faceted approach that he has continued to develop with Tanztheater Wuppertal.