9 DECEMBER - 13 DECEMBER 2009

Raimund Hoghe

Sans-titre      

DANCE

In partnership with the Festival d’Automne à Paris

Conception and choreograpy Raimund Hoghe / With Faustin Linyekula / Photography Rosa Frank / Lighting Raimund Hoghe.
Five exceptional performances in 2009/2010 at Gennevilliers following the piece's première at Festival Montpellier Danse 2009.

Raimund Hoghe's work Sans-titre ("Untitled")  is a solo choreographic piece created for the Festival Montpellier Danse 2009, in association with the choreographer and dancer Faustin Linyekula. "I chose to work with Faustin Linyekula because despite our obvious differences we felt a strong, invisible bond, a kind of fraternity that established itself almost inspite of ourselves: we both refuse to take a stance as victims, or to rest on our past achievements. Creative art is a struggle to keep alive our dreams." More than a straightforward encounter between Africa and the West, Sans-titre is a confrontation, transgressing the cultural boundaries demarcated by the relative absence of people of African origin on the European stage. "This is why I have chosen to work with classical music, Bach or Purcell, the ultimate symbol of European culture as a kind of counterpoint, a hiatus. Faustin agreed to the idea… This piece is more about politics than art, inevitably." 

Raimund Hoghe began his career writing for the German weekly magazine Die Zeit. From 1980 to 1990, he was a librettist with Pina Bausch at the Tanztheater Wuppertal, before writing and composing his own works for the theatre. Inspired by Pasolini's motto gettare il proprio corpo nella lotta ("to throw one's own body into battle"), his works present the body on an identifiably real, human scale, far removed from the strictures of conventional design and the visual ideal of the body as merchandise (clothes sizes etc.).
 
Raimund Hoghe's dance theatre is a meditation on memory and history, drawing on its confrontation with the power and beauty of music: a theatre of pure sensation, minimalist and explicitly political. Today, Hoghe lives and works in Düsseldorf. He is the winner of numerous prizes, including the Deutscher Produzentenpreis für Choreografie in 2001,  and the Prix de la Critique (France) for his Swan Lake, 4 Acts in 2006. In 2008, he was voted Dancer of the Year by critics on the magazine Ballet-Tanz. In 2008, Hoghe presented his work Young People, Old Voices in Gennevilliers during le festival (tjcc).

In 2001, dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula founded the Kabako Studios, dedicated to new works and training in dance and visual theatre. The studios are now based in Kisangani, in the north-eastern People's Democratic Republic of the Congo. Linyekula's works Dialogue Series III: Dinozord and Festival of Lies were presented at the Festival d'Avignon 2007. In the same year, he received an award from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. In 2008-9, his highly original production of Bérénice was presented at the Studio-Théâtre de la Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de Gennevilliers.

Production Raimund Hoghe Company
Co-production Festival Montpellier Danse 2009.
With the support of Studios Kabako, Ménagerie de verre (Studiolab projects) and Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté in Belfort
Premiere Thursday, July 2, 2009 - Festival Montpellier Danse 2009
Co-production Théâtre de Gennevilliers – Festival d’Automne à Paris