Frédéric Flamand's work has always addressed a new choreographic theatre composed of a set of interfaces between the different disciplines of dance and the plastic and audiovisual arts. In 1973 he founded Plan K in Brussels, and since 1991 he has been artistic director of the Choreographic Centre of the French Community in Belgium, which he renamed Charleroi/Danses. Through a work of decomposition of performances and the insertion of new techniques, Flamand proposes a confrontation between reality and mediatisation, between the actor and the object, which allows for commentary and the taking into account of the situation in the making, and to trigger a series of questions. In his performances, the dancers interact with the objects and machines on stage and their movements are transformed into impulses. Frédéric Flamand's creations have toured the United States, Japan and numerous countries in Europe. They are always characterised by multimedia and focus on the relationship between dance and architecture. Like Titanic ('92), Ex Machina ('94), Moving Target ('96) inspired by Nijinsky's Uncensored Notebooks and performed in collaboration with American architects Diller and Scofidio. Also with the help of this American duo came EJM1, Muybridge-Man walking at Ordinary Speed ('98) and EJM2 ('98), the former addressing the work of Edward James Muybridge, the latter the inventor of chromophotography Etienne-Jules Marey. Furthermore, on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition in Hannover 2000, Flamand was invited to collaborate with the architect Jean Nouvel to realise a project on the Future of Work.Metapolis-Project 972 is the title of Flamand's latest work, presented as a national premiere in Rovereto and co-produced by the Oriente Occidente Festival. It is the result of a collaboration with Iraqi architect and designer Zaha Hadid, recent winner of the competition for the Museums of Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and Rome. Flamand saw in Hadid's work the possibility of fusing the two arts of space: dance and architecture. This led to the common idea of integrating dancers, scenic elements and lighting in the unique enterprise of 'making space dance'. The path of the creation revolves around an imaginary city characterised by a series of contrasts such as fluidity/attrition, private/public, individual/plot, mobile/immobile, urbanisation/ depopulation, order/chaos. "I also injected into the conception of the performance," explains Flamand, "this idea of the development of virtual reality linked to the emergence of new communication technologies, which are generators of processes of materialisation of the body. Where the urban environment is increasingly anonymous, Metapolis is "the vision of a beyond of the city in space but also in the time of its representation". Drawing on the avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century, in particular Futurism and Cubo-Futurism, the two designers address the theme of the relationship between man and the city, through physical and abstract movement and the use of real and virtual space. Zaha Hadid has a "vision of the city as a place interwoven with continuous networks of energies that saturate space and surround bodies". In the set design, the only tangible references to traditional urban spaces are three bridges, retractable and movable, three symbols that metaphorically represent communication and human impact on the urban network system. The rest of the scene is composed of grids of lines and projections on the screen that constitute a kind of 'computer drawing' and 'iconographic theme'. The scenic space is thus mediatised and this going beyond the city, towards a global mass and a totalising universe, is represented choreographically by Flamand in an alternation of cyclic juxtapositions such as the fluid gestures and cadenced rhythm of the work or the whirlpools, rapid pulsions, slower movements. Dance once again becomes the place of social experience and in the speed of the modern metropolis, man needs to stop and retreat into himself in a 'symbiotic universe' with the fabric of the city.
