Oriente Occidente dedicates this year a retrospective to Bud Blumenthal, a choreographer who revealed himself to Italy in the last edition of the Festival through the interpretation by Ballet de Lorraine of Phantom Limbic, a piece he created for the French company in homage to the light magician Loie Fuller. This retrospective will allow for a deeper understanding of this author with an organic, fluid, and hybrid style resulting from the fusion of athletic training with the study of release techniques, contact improvisation, and tai chi chuan, through three works linked by a common denominator: free inspiration from a literary or poetic text. They reference Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses with the solo Les Sentiers d’Ulysse and the choral piece Les Reflets d’Ulysse, while the other solo presented at the Festival, 24 Haïkus, is inspired by the eponymous short Japanese poems.
Bud Blumenthal has American origins, but his career as a dancer first, and then as an author, took place in the heart of Europe. Active in Belgium since 1988, the year he joined Frédéric Flamand's group Plan K/Charleroi Danses, Blumenthal began choreographing in 1991, creating, in collaboration with Michèle Noiret, the duet Louisiana Breakfast. The following year he composed Fishtracks, his first entirely personal piece, in which his interest in new technologies emerged, later developed with collaborators such as video artist Antonin De Bemels for Red Cliff (2002) and Les Sentiers d’Ulysse, or architect Paolo Atzori for Full Play, a solo piece in which he experiments with live interactivity between dance, music, and images.
His participation in the Avignon Festival in 2000 (with the solo 24 Haïkus from 1996) and the creation of Noeud de Sable (a duo from 1997) brought Blumenthal to the attention of international critics and marked him as an author capable of combining the poetry of movement with the most innovative developments in digital technologies on stage. For the choral work Les Reflets d’Ulysse, created this April for the Charleroi Biennale, Blumenthal used the metaphor of Ulysses' journey to represent, through six dancers and a curious stage setting suspended between dream and reality, the discovery of the self and the world. A modern Ulysses, reflected and multiplied in images and states of the body, which, through a hypertextual dramaturgy reminiscent of Joyce's various narrative techniques and a series of scenic-technological devices, constructs a journey through the city and the contemporary world. A kaleidoscopic journey that is simultaneously urban, intimate, fantastic, and surreal. The creation takes its cue from the previous Les Sentiers d’Ulysse.
