Pierre Droulers

Exhibiting, for a choreographer, means confronting a fixation of gestures that form the living body in a work. But it is also the possibility to draw up a subjective cartography of materials and sources, allowing spectators to recompose new interpretations. How to display the jigsaw puzzle of a creation spread out over forty years? For Pierre Droulers, a choreographer who has always left open a broad space for the mixing of plastic, textual and musical layers within his dance, the shift from the stage towards an exhibition space provides an opportunity for a new combination: a re-deployment of pages from the book Sunday, which digs out galleries in time, producing internal liaisons and echoes. More than just an archive, these photos, notebooks, drawings, scores, recordings and assorted objects draw out a labyrinthine pathway through the mysteries of choreographic creation. On the occasion of the donation of part of his archives to the CN D, the exhibition will feature an activation time, which will embody what these documents are murmuring. Giving an archive almost means tempting others to seize it and bring it up to the present.

Pierre Droulers trained at Mudra, Maurice Béjart’s school, but also with Jerzy Grotowski and Bob Wilson. At a crossroads between disciplines, ever since his first productions (Désert and Dispersion, 1976), he has played on a plurality of modes: dance, words, music. By surrounding himself with visual artists (Michel François, Ann Veronica Janssens and David Claerbout) and, even though choreography still remains his centre of gravity, he has matured a form of work that eliminates theatricality and approaches the abstraction of light and empty space (De l’air et du vent, 1996, Petites formes, 1997, MA 2000). From 2004 to 2017, he was the artistic co-director, then an associate artist at Charleroi Dance, the only choreographic centre in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.