I saw Dominique Bagouet’s Necesito, pièce pour Grenade twice this year, in the space of 30 days: in May at the Palais de Chaillot and, in April, at the fine Auditorium Jean-Pierre Miquel in Vincennes, a well-heeled eastern Paris suburb.
Both times, formally, at least, it was performed by the l’Ensemble chorégraphique of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris (CNSMDP); the Ensemble chorégraphique is not just a run-of-the mill student dance group.
The artistic production (as well as the sound) for the two shows was also the same. Notably, with Rita Cioffi, who danced the piece as a member of Bagouet’s troupe, doing the Reconstruction chorégraphique and with Christine Bombal, who also danced with Bagouet, acting as Responsable du master (original interpretation) to the Ensemble’s Maitresse de ballet.
The participative presence of Rita Cioffi and Christine Bombal and, perhaps, the reconstruction of music and set, especially the floor, seem essential to producing a quality materialization of Necesito. Dominique Bagouet‘s pieces are passed down through the personal experience and memory of performers and other witness. Rather than draw up a choreography, Bagouet would transform an atmospheric/feeling/sensibility into people moving within its space.
For instance, for Necesito, Bagouet has imagined the atmospheric of the last bastion of Muslim Spain through the lenses of “a queen in ecstasy, a Catholic king in crisis of self-doubt, a wailing emir, a dreamy Infante, a poltroon of a torero, a barefoot dancer, a basic tourist, a solitary gypsy and an Al Andalus wizard” … as experienced and evoked in the movement of some contemporary tourists, all of whom look good enough to eat.
The Briqueterie’s notes describe the choreo-scenographic result for the Necesito atmospheric pretty well: “In shorts and summer dresses, a slightly off-beat group of tourists walks with slow intensity around the scene, sitting, laying down, stretching voluptuously. A floor in rose-colored marble incrusted with mosaic tiles evokes the Al Hambra.”
The simplest thing I can say is that what I saw at Vincennes in April was choreography while that at Chaillot in May was dance. If the choreography makes it interesting, even amusing (Bagouet wanted that, too), the dance in it made it absolutely breathtaking.
Karine, my, as my Ma used to put it, my, ummm, friend, was with me for the Chaillot performance, but not at Vincennes.
She and I met Christine Bombal on the stairway as we were going out. She put the success down to changes in the cast between the two performances and Chaillot’s better stage. She remarked with a rather vigorous sigh that Necesito was not a single choreography but seven separate pieces, each performer in the piece supporting the other performers in the other pieces.
Karine, who was dancing in those days, interpreted Bombal’s remark – on Necesito being an imbrication of its different performances – as an affirmation of what she felt, as a dancer, that Bagouet was all about: taking time to find the dance in the choreography. Although she rages that the world was better when Bagouet was alive – “We ate okay, paid rent and danced with a Bagouet or a Charaund! Try that today” – she nevertheless tells me that this Necesito was a Necesito, never seen before or since or ever will be again.
But I can’t think that scaring up the right people, having a better venue, mastering the complexity of a choreography or having time to develop makes dance from choreography.
None of it takes into account spectator experience – essential to dance success.
And I think that Bagouet’s approach to choreography was at least partially based on obliging his performers to reverse engineer the choreography back to the dance in it.
Memory keeps the choreographer searching for the original atmospheric/feeling in the arrangement. Searching brings performers and choreographer alike to take account of the atmospheric/feeling/sensibility and, ultimately, to use movement to pass that atmospheric/feeling/sensibility to spectators.
So I think I can say that Karine’s enthusiasm and my own and that of other spectators – many of whom who had an air of having been present for the initial revelation of Necesito – is attributable to our experience of the movement within those bodies within that choreographic transmission. Vincennes was good. I watched as I do ballet, noting against an original. Maybe at Vincennes they might not have had the right cast, the right venue, had the time to master and develop the complexity of the task. But in the end I don’t think any of these things really matter if choreography takes no account of dance.
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Dominique Bagouet’s “Necesito, pièce pour Grénade” (1993) hasn’t changed much visually but must always be reconstructed heart, head and soul to succeed. “Necesito” was conceived in 1990, created and premièred in 1991; Dominique Bagouet died in 1992 with many future projects swirling in his head. For a bit more on Bagouet’s transmitter performers, see The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words, “No rivalry here: Fabrice Ramalingom dances the heart of a guy [by Tracy Danison]”
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
