8 octobER - 18 octobER 2009

Rachid
Ouramdane

Des témoins ordinaires

DANCE

In partnership with the Festival d’Automne à Paris

Conception Rachid Ouramdane / With  Lora Juodkaite, Mille Lundt, Wagner Schwartz, Georgina Vila Bruch, Yeojin Yun / Music Jean-Baptiste Julien / Lighting Yves Godin / Video Jenny Teng et Nathalie Gasdoué / Technical video assistant Jacques Hoepffner / Costumes La Bourette / Technical direction Sylvain Giraudeau / Light direction Stéphane Graillot / Dramaturgy assistant Camille Louis / with Erell Melscoët

Choreographer Rachid Ouramdane's distinctive work features an insightful mix of dance and documentary. Each piece challenges the affects of the individuals experiencing it. Video imagery appeals to each viewer's imagination, his or her subjective world of references. The sets and staging incorporate filmed interviews: the immediacy and spontaneity of the spoken word resonates with the other presences on stage, in a dialogue combining life fragments, memories and bodies in motion.

Rachid Ouramdane's new work, Des témoins ordinaires, takes up where his earlier solo piece Loin... left off – confronting the traces left by our violent history. Ouramdane has interviewed people who have endured acts of torture, asking them how they feel now about life, other people and the impulse (or otherwise) to bear witness. 

On stage, five silhouettes walk and intersect, their slow progress marking out the elastic space of time. Voices are heard, anonymous faces appear on layers of mist, blending with the figures. In a corner, one of the silhouettes collapses, melting slowly into the ground. We gaze, as if into a void, at the live metamorphosis of this prostrate body.

In Des témoins ordinaires, Rachid Ouramdane presents filmed voices and faces recounting their experience of violence, and the stigmata left on their bodies and minds. The figures on stage resonate with the spoken words, twisting and dislocating until their contorsions become almost unwatchable. The history of humanity is encapsulated in the empty space of the stage. Private stories and the march of History itself converge and mingle. Rachid Ouramdane examines how we can bear witness to the unspeakable. The interviews projected on stage remind us of the endless repetitions of History. By questioning the very act of witness, Rachid Ouramdane explores our modern tendency to "tell all" – the over-exploitation of individual testimony. He offers an examination of the frontier territory between humanity and barbarism, ourselves and others.

Erell Melscoët

Rehearsed in Gennevilliers, April/May 2009
Premiered in Bonlieu, Scène nationale d’Annecy on May 27, 2009
Presented at the Festival d’Avignon 2009