Exciting, a little scary, thrilling, unique, héatre-élévision is also a one-person show. One person in the audience, that is. For only a fiver, you get to spend 50 minutes alone with the work of Boris Charmatz, a young French choreographer who made his festival debut in 1999 in a more traditional setting, on stage. He returns with a surprise package.
Tickets are timed on the hour. On entering a darkened room, you are invited to lie on a black cushioned platform - echoes of the psychiatrists' couch or the examination table. The usher leaves, having pointed out the panic button. It's an unsettling moment.
Technology whirring, tiny dancers above, you feel a bit like Gulliver, tickled but slightly fearful as you are surrounded. Forget conventional TV viewing. Forget the proscenium arch. This is a new way to experience a performance. Charmatz choreographs light, sound, people and a piano to extraordinary effect. He fits dance into the box by keeping the movement controlled in a tight space. Barking and panting like dogs, tongues hanging out, laughing hysterically, yelping or whispering, the company provides an intimate, sometimes funny, voyeuristic, adrenaline-boosting experience. And when harmony is finally achieved, it's uplifting. Try it and see.
Down the road at the art college, Charmatz has curated the art installation/ dance promenade Statuts. Audience members enter, buy a drink if they like, walk around the corridors for a couple of hours, chatting and popping in to each of the sign-posted rooms that contain a dance work.
It's tapas dance, and on the menu are boys pretending to be drunk (Marten Spangberg) and girls in a gym (Sharon Lockhart), both captured on grainy film. There are a glorious nine minutes of standing in the pitch black (too pitch for some) to watch the Superamas' heavenly light installation Diggin' Up. After that, you can weigh yourself on scales that kick-start a meat-grinding machine or whisper into your ears (Sylvia Bossu). In the middle of it all, a big portion of live dance by Gilles Touyard brings the audience together for some speed and danger on two man-size potter's wheels.
Technically polished and full of bright ideas about the life of the body, these two Charmatz experiments work a fascinating alchemy on the audience.
