The audacity of a "no return" movement
Directly from the 2006 Avignon Festival comes to Oriente Occidente the piece by an old acquaintance: François Verret's Sans Retour, still a champion of the French nouvelle danse of the 1980s that has managed to withstand the shocks and upheavals of contemporary dance in constant turmoil. We know a lot about him, if not almost everything. He became a choreographer in the fateful 1980 (a felicitous year for Pina Bausch and others), immediately gaining fame in France and Europe as an introspective artist, not inclined to be dazzled by the spotlight, yet imaginative, startling, already a spokesperson for a dance-theater capable of extracting the most diverse styles and expressive materials and promoting the most daring combinations.
Verret never wanted to create a company bearing his name, at least until the late 1990s. He said, "I am interested in finding an original theatrical expression, each time transformable in relation to encounters with different companions. I am fascinated by living in dangerous situations with other people." Indeed, all his performances—from his debut piece, Tabula Rasa, which won the first prize at the prestigious Bagnolet choreographic competition in 1980, to the recent Sans Retour—have been born from collaborations with different artists: actors like Daniel Emilfork, Daniel Kenigsberg, Frédéric Leidgens, Alain Rigout; dancers like Anne Koren, Bernardo Montet, Mathilde Monnier, Jean-Christophe Pare; musicians like Ghédalia Tazartes, Yumi Nara, Fred Frith, Jean-Pierre Drouet; sculptors like Goury, Claudine Brahem; and lighting designers like Rémi Nicolas and Christian Dubet.
Before becoming artistic director of the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers in 1993—a space for creation, research, and interaction between artists and the public—François Verret contributed to Association 1B, the Groupe de Recherche Chorégraphique of the Paris Opera, and the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers. With the piece Kaspar Konzert, he settled in Rennes, becoming an associated artist of the Théâtre National de Bretagne in 2002, where he signed eight productions with his own company, including Chantier Musil—the last having premiered in Italy, in Turin, before this latest debut—in which all the elements of a path veering towards literature and the great texts of the 20th century were apparent, such as Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which also inspired Tokyo Musil Impromptu (2003).
Dissolving dance into a reflective poetic stratosphere, making it permeable to the flow of thoughts and literary metaphors, is also what happens in Contrecoup (2004), this time inspired by William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
Finally, we arrive at Sans Retour: for this brand new creation, Verret seemingly chooses the same fellow travelers as Melville's Moby Dick (and also Orson Welles), and embarks on his Noah's Ark with the "usual" diverse artists: actors, musicians, dancers, circus performers, set designers, and lighting designers. However, this time he engages in a struggle, a hand-to-hand combat—akin to that against the realm of monsters, terror, and immense depths that elude human intelligence in the American writer's masterpiece—between language and stage writing. François appears on stage (last year, let's remember, he signed the solo In the Back of my Mind for himself) and contributes to setting in motion not the words of Moby Dick but the echo of those words.
"Irène Filiberti writes, 'A poetic landscape forged from mysterious memories, shadows, traces, signs, Sans Retour opens a gateway to design the imaginary and its destiny,' words of audacity equal to the categorical, unsettling, and promising title of this spectacle, in its essence of being 'without return'."
