Not everyone charmed by Charmatz's 'Enfant'

A band of children have triumphed in a world dance premiere at the Avignon festival. 27 kids, including the son of choreographer Boris Charmatz, took centre stage in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes.

Boris Brussey

Enfant (‘child’) is a mix of violence and fragility that begins monotonously – a crane drags and lifts the inert bodies of two adult dancers while a third one bumps up and down helplessly on a conveyer belt.

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Interview

Brent Gregston

Nine other dancers appear on stage holding children who are seemingly asleep. Some of the dancers hold the children tenderly but others manipulate their limbs as if they were objects.

They lift up their bodies, make them fly, hug them, roll them and drag them – in other words control their every motion. Clearly, Charmatz agrees with the French philosopher who once wrote “children are hostages of the adults.”

Two of the dancers told me the relationship with the children overpowered any single idea of what this piece is supposed to be about. “Everything you see on stage is a consequence of communication and trust between the dancers and the children,” said Mathieu Burner. “We spent time with these kids and we spent time with these ideas and we developed them slowly and a bit blindly,” added Eleonora Bauer.

Choreographer Boris Charmatz has evoked a lot of the bad things that can happen to a child: physical and sexual abuse, imposed rituals and boredom, enforced submission.

But the kids are alright – in the end. They wake up and follow the adults in a procession behind a bagpipe player. And then something happens in their heads – one doesn’t know what – and revolt sets in.

The kids run riot and subdue the adults. Superior in numbers, they encircle and overpower each adult dancer like a hapless Gulliver. The dark vibes give way to laughs as the children, some of them ripping off their clothes in triumph, take final possession of the stage.

The chaos of bodies and limbs is an arresting piece of abstract dance that enthralled most but not all spectators.

Discordant boos punctuated a standing ovation. A spectator from New York complained that it took so long to revive the kids from their corpse-like immobility - almost 40 minutes. A woman from Avignon objected that Charmatz simply transposed her son’s noisy schoolyard to the courtyard of the Palais des Papes.

It’s easy to understand why the artistic directors of the festival, so deadly and self-consciously avant-garde, chose Charmatz to be the official associate artist. Charmatz, just 38, is an earnest enfant terrible, an artist who dutifully takes risks to provoke us. His work is not a feel-good piece about growing up. It’s about determinism rather than the loss of innocence.

Charmatz took a giant dance leap of faith by counting on a horde of kids, many of them without any dance training.

It accounts for the perhaps unintended emotional impact on dancers and audience alike. “I look at the piece now and I see a whole gamut of relations with the children: there are very tender relationships with the children and there are panicked and aggressive relationships,” said Eleonora Bauer.

“Kids possess an absolute honesty that we lose as adult members of society,” said Mathieu Burner. “On stage, the hardest partner is an animal or a child because they will never fake their emotions.” He also said the experience of dancing in Enfant made him feel like a parent.

“I’m thinking of having a child of my own,” he added.