Boris Charmatz
Emmanuelle Huynh
Odile Duboc

At the opening of the Musée de la Danse in 2009 – centred on the theme of Tatsumi Hijikata’s phrase, ‘I wanted to strangle time’ – Boris Charmatz and Emmanuelle Huynh performed a slowed down version of boléro 2, the second part of Trois boléros by Odile Duboc (1996). This slowing down of the music, this stretching out of the embrace gave rise to a desire to explore this material afresh, through the vision and direction of Odile Duboc. Étrangler le temps is a homage to this pioneer of contemporary dance, whose ideas on the permeability of the body and the power of feelings exerted a deep influence on them. It was also an act of creation incorporating vestiges from the choreographic careers of this duo. It pivots between two periods, offering a condensation of time. The slowing down reveals another boléro. The obsessive slowness of each movement, of each brushing against each other, increases the effect of the interlinked bodies; it produces zooms, spotlighting flesh, permeability, zones of contact. Between the strangled piece and the original version there is a dialogue that talks about performance, archives and transmission, In extracting these states, of this materiality that Odile Duboc devoted her life to exploring, and that the choreographers Emmanuelle Huynh and Boris Charmatz brought back into play, each in their own way, a different history of dance is written, for the bodies that created it and perpetuate it.

Choreographer and director of Musée de la Danse, Boris Charmatz defines himself above all as a dancer. Since the duo À bras-le-corps (1993), he has been using the medium of dance to explore and redefine choreography by exhausting its possibilities – as in Levée des conflits, manger and more recently 10000 gestes (2017).
 

Dancer, choreographer and director of the CNDC in Angers (2004–2012), Emmanuelle Huynh has created a body of work centred on transmission and the breaking down of artistic boundaries. Since Muà (1994), her work has combined dance with other fields, such as poetry, the art of Japanese flower arranging (Shinbai, 2009), music (Cribles, 2009) and architecture (A taxi driver, an architect and the High Line, 2016).