Dance as a social vehicle, as a means of integrating the body into space and space into the body. Frédéric Flamand, since founding the Plan K group in 1973 in Brussels, later integrated with the Ballet Royal de Wallonie and subsequently renamed Charleroi/Danses, has demonstrated great poetic coherence and a well-defined creative purpose. His research consists of developing an osmotic process between dance, the audiovisual universe, and architecture, resulting in hybrid multimedia performances where the visual impact is dominant. No longer anthropocentric shows, but what interests the choreographer is the relationship, the network of connections that the human body can establish on stage.
"It seems to me that in dance," Flamand declares, "everything is possible. What interests me is going beyond what is shown to us, and dance is certainly more conducive to transmitting the invisible. It is a source of resistance against the banalization of images. It responds to the metamorphosis of the contemporary world because it is the meeting point of the interdisciplinary concerns of contemporary art."
And where does man fit into this context of reflection? For Flamand, man must question the new status of the body that the unstoppable advancement of machines and new technologies has set in motion. This reflective point, this analysis of the human-machine relationship, is the basis of the trilogy created in collaboration with Fabrizio Plessi, including La Chute d'Icare (’89), Titanic (’92), and Ex-Machina (’94).
New technologies are increasingly invasive, challenging the loss of the classical spatiotemporal dimension in favor of a virtual dimension where the flesh-and-blood body loses its consistency. Thus, the schizophrenia caused by the lack of spatial references in Moving Target, a work created in '96 in collaboration with New York architects Diller+Scofidio, who designed a scenographic setup with a large mirror tilted at 45° degrees that doubles the image of the stage, destabilizing the viewer's perception.
The architecture of the immaterial returns, nuanced, in Metapolis, a show signed with Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid and co-produced by Oriente Occidente in 2000 for the Festival's twentieth anniversary. Metapolis, meaning beyond the city, was the utopian city suspended between the real and the virtual, between fluidity and friction, between public and private, urbanization and depopulation, where the body tends to dematerialize according to a poetics of the fragment.
The theme shifts to the world of work in Frédéric Flamand's collaboration with French architect Jean Nouvel. The meeting, which took place for the creation of an installation for the thematic pavilion Future of Work at the Hanover Expo 2000 (Work Leisure), was a prolific starting point for the creation of Body Work Leisure, Flamand's latest creation for Charleroi/Danses-Plan K, which the Festival hosts this year.
On the scene - consisting of a three-level modular metal structure that develops a play of platforms on which screens, translucent walls, and video projections move - sequences related to the organization of work in relation to leisure time follow one another. "In this period of significant changes in the labor market," recalls the Belgian choreographer, "the primary concern is to put the human being back at the center of a process that might be perceived as a threat, because terms like computerization, network work, globalization, mobility, virtual worlds redefine our relationship with the world today."
Through an analysis of the present and an examination of the contrasts between economically developed countries and developing countries, whose dividing line seems to be the possession or lack of digital technologies, Flamand, with Body Work Leisure, paints a fresco of today and a vision of the future.
