Joëlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia form a pair of dancers who, from a technical and stylistic point of view, refer only to themselves, beyond any functional reference. The company they founded and direct, l'Esquisse, is unanimously regarded as one of the most remarkable realities of young French dance.
Bouvier and Obadia have been working as a duo since 1980, when they created their first duo, Regard perdu, which won first prize at the International Choreography Competition in Nyon (Switzerland). They were then joined by Jean-Marc Poirez, and together they presented Terre battue, which won first prize at the International Choreography Competition in Bagnolet. Again in duo they created Noces d'argile, and in quartet Tête close, presented at the Biennale du Val-de-Marne and in the United States (1983).
In 1984, together with three other dancers (including the Italian Raffaella Giordano) they created Vertèe, with which they debuted in Italy at the Incontri Internazionali di Rovereto.
In 1985, Esquisse created Le Royaume Millenaire, a production of the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, which debuted in June at the Théâtre Municipal in Angers, and was invited to the Châteauvallon Festival in July. French critics greeted this latest Esquissec production with a unanimous anthem of acclaim.
The dance of the Esquisse (violent, obsessive, of a powerful and very physical energy, without intellectualistic rarefactions) recalls, at a distance, certain forms of expressionist theatricality and a dramaturgy of movement of vaguely oriental inspiration. In reality, however, Bouvier and Obadia eschew pigeonholing of method, remaining always and only themselves, capable of astonishing creative originality.
Their work, they claim, does not depend on any particular technique: ‘Only the awareness of the body and the dimension of the actor are the constant and essential elements of our research. This physical study, closely linked to emotion, uses different elements (energy, weight, temporal and relational space) capable of generating an expressive force.
Le royaume millenarie
He: suspens, painful ecstasy.
Her: A bubbling energy, a pathos that spreads.
Dancing as if their whole life depended on it. In Bouvier and Obadia there is a kind of urgency, the full necessity of meaning that exceeds. What they put on stage, without talking about what they want or what they are looking for, is a repertoire of images that smell of suffering, of the desire to live. They are their own enigma. A vivid and brutal enigma.
Running, falling, twisting, clashing, feet flexed or crossed, faces pounded or lost in each other's bodies, mute cries, curved backs, contractions, sick shifts, bodies bent, lost: their cul-de-jatte dance is a fiction. In reality it is an explosion. It speaks of miserable, sumptuous, immemorial dances. And what is at issue is the aching grace of bodies as matter, not an identifiable technique.
And the taste for rags, torn cloths, baroque, faux-rich, cleverly elaborated costumes. Or the perfidious sets, with torture benches, sedans, dwarf chairs.
There is something candid in having fun playing like that, with fire, in disregarding the measure of risk.
But, beggarly young sovereigns, cruel to themselves and at least as sweet, do not linger, rightly, on the sweetish slope of sadistic delights. Their path lies elsewhere. Their ardour drags them along other paths. They climb further, much further.
And it is to take on the matter of origins.
