In his dance pieces, the French choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz explores themes of an existential nature. Most recently, in “enfant”, he examined the relationship between children and adults, once again emphasising his reputation as a globally acclaimed dance innovator who constantly crosses lines to visual art and philosophy, thus providing impetus for innovative developments in the international dance scene.
“Dance is the mother of anorexia” is an assertion with which he now prefixes his latest piece “manger”, exploring our ambivalent relationship to the subject of “food”, particularly with regard to the ideal body. Charmatz examines the intake of food in terms of its imagery, joining forces with fourteen dancers to examine how we manage to swallow and digest bitter reality day in and day out.
He also subjects the physical act of eating to aesthetic scrutiny: we open our mouths, we chew, we swallow, and we digest. We can eat while lying down, walking, or standing. We even manage to stuff ourselves to death – remember the film classic “La Grande Bouffe”. “manger” sets out to reveal a constitutive contradiction: for all its banality and everydayness, eating is filled to bursting with symbolism.