Jean-Claude Gallotta, indomitable and unclassifiable. From the beginning, he reversed the typical path of technical acculturation in dance: even before becoming a professional dancer, at the age of 23, he created his first choreography. He came to dance at 20, after studying Fine Arts as a student. He studied tap dance and classical ballet, and just three years later he began composing on his own, albeit without much conviction. The deeply shy Gallotta, born in 1950 in Grenoble, looked at the world of dance with a childlike amazement, mingled with suspicious attraction. Yet, he remained unconvinced, perhaps due to a certain genealogy— the traditional dance world he encountered.
Ambitious and restless, he aimed high, so high above the materiality of the body that he even contemplated becoming a priest. He hesitated, however, allowing himself to be seduced by spiritual philosophies. Notably, in recent years, he fell in love with the dance of Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer whose pursuit of a Platonic idea of pure beauty in contemporary dance resonated deeply with Gallotta. Through Cunningham's performances, Gallotta discovered his own artistic mission: to filter the mystery of physicality into a new poetic-intellectual consciousness capable of sublimating immediate pragmatic reality. Thanks to Cunningham, Gallotta reconciled with dance.
Thus, no longer a priest but once again a choreographer. Yet, his love for dance was conflicted. So conflicted that at the age of 27, the choreographer was struck by a severe nervous breakdown. The following year, he traveled to New York and, as he describes himself in his biography, was "apparently cured."
At 29, back in Grenoble, Jean-Claude Gallotta founded the Groupe Emilie Dubois, a name that may mean many things or perhaps nothing at all. This company, named after the enigmatic Dubois, embarked on an adventure with members like Léo Standard, the scenographer, and Henry Torgue, the musician. The group of dancers and actors was diverse, colorful, eccentric, and multinational. Mathilde Altaraz, the group's first dancer, stands out as both the finest example and the greatest instigator of Gallotta's work: "She is at once the finest example and the greatest instigator of all my work," Gallotta says of her.
From 1980 to 1985, with humor, extravagance, and freshness, Jean-Claude Gallotta tirelessly created Ulysse, Grandeur Nature, Daphis et Cholé, Hommage à Yves P., Les Aventures d'Ivan Vaffan, and Mammane. These works marked a restless, tender, collectivist, iconoclastic discourse, balanced in its imbalances, rigorous in its abandonments, and animated by a boldness characteristic of the deeply timid.
Today, Jean-Claude Gallotta "tells" stories exclusively through abstract movements, avoiding specific theatrical codes. His creative discourse seems directed towards "Dance-Instruction." Dance as a reflection on dance: on academic ballet, Cunningham's technique, the primal impulses of tribal dances, and certain rigid and open positions in Indian dance. This reflective process incorporates references to a lost rhetoric, an anxiety for perfection drawn from a "submerged" gestural world filled with dark zones and clear nostalgias. It also yearns for new territories to conquer or reconquer, as envisioned utopias. This abstract yet narrative language, simultaneously lyrical, romantic, erotic, and arrogant in its absolute abstraction, supports Gallotta's joyously psychotic solos, gestural embroideries of compressed and explicit anxiety, choreographed prisons where the actor craftsman becomes both master and slave.
All of Gallotta's intellectual pluralism stems from a curious sacred sense of dance, an apparent irreverence that nonetheless respects "Instruction (Dance)." Seen as a lost paradise, a transcendental term, a dawn of life, an imaginative utopia. Seen as a poetic universe where everything is possible: every crowd, every malice, every act of love, every surreal manipulation of movement.
It is within this strange "mysticism" of gesture, in this candid and astute intellectualism, in this bizarre and restless dance fantasy ambitiously protesting towards a new anthropology of dance ("that new breed of actor-dancers reinventing choreographic art," as Gallotta puts it), that Jean-Claude has managed to transform himself into one of the most seductive choreographers of the new European dance scene in just a few years.
