Performance created during the company's residence in Sceaux from September 1998 to March 1999
Co-production of Les Gémeaux/Sceaux/Scène Nationale/Cie Quat'Zarts with the support of Adami, Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, AFAA Association Française d'Action Artistique, Ministère des Affaires étrangères , Drac Île de France, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
Catherine Berbessou is one of the many disciples of the couple Françoise (1925) and Dominique Dupuis (1930), pioneers of modern dance across the Alps where they still dance today, she trained in the classical and the verb of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, he a dancer in the 'red' troupe of Jean Weidt, the historic communist exponent of European expressive dance. It was the early eighties and, after the founding meeting with these two masters, Catherine soon became a performer for Joelle Bouvier- Regis Obadia (also pupils of the Dupuy), i.e. L'Esquisse, a group with a strong and sensual physical sign, where she remained for five years, until 1988, before moving to the ranks of Claude Brumachon, where she was engaged for another two. An exemplary career in the heart of today's most titled French choreography, which in 1990 prompted her to set up her own company. A trio, "En marche arrière" and a duo "Candy Apple" were born, which did not exclude a return with l'Esquisse for "Plein soleil" in 1992, but the following year, after signing "A' table", her third ballet, Catherine was seized by a passion for the tango, which she studied and practised in Buenos Aires with great masters such as Pupi Castello, Graziella Gonzales and Gustavo Naveira. She is among the first, Catherine, to realise that the so-called 'nouvelle danse', having exhausted its rising momentum, needs nourishment, fresh saps, other flavours, on pain of a refined but bloodless mannerism. On the strength of her experience and what she had learned in the milongas, Berbessou made her debut at the 1996 Biennale de Lyon with her excellent dancers under the new name Quat'zarts in "A fuego lento", a mix of Tango steps and French contemporary dance modes. A very successful show, twice guest of the Oriente Occidente festival, which casts the tango in the form of dance-theatre, in some ways a 'cousin' of the Bauschian dance, and which re-evaluates the carnality of the couple's dance, a symbol of the radical impossibility of love and its eternal quest, between courtship and combat, on the rhythms and voices (even a rare man-woman 'duettango') of distance, nostalgia, turmoil, aroused and always unsatisfied desire, investigated and described minute by minute, from dressing to the tight embraces to the goodbyes at the end of the evening. The tango, with its variety and richness, continued, however, to nourish the imagination of the choreographer, who presents herself, to all intents and purposes, as the continuation, at the end of the 20th century, of that discovery and ennobling of the tango that saw Paris as the protagonist in the 1910s and again in 1983 with the mega-show 'Argentine Tango' by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, destined to triumph on Broadway as well. Then, in 1999, came the new piece, 'Valser', in which Catherine Berbessou, flanked by Argentinean Federico Rodriguez Moreno as assistant, teacher and dancer, reinterprets once again the inexhaustible universe of the tango, not a dance, but a world, where the profound sentiment of life, of the brief joys and infinite bitterness, of daily toil and dreams of happiness, filters through. The tango is, in reality, many tangos, between accordeons perhaps of German origin, heartfelt Italian melodies, Iberian nerve, and the aftertaste of black rhythms. And among the many tangos, there is also the tango-valse, which recurs in the story of this complex musical and choreographic universe, in the most spontaneous and spring-like sense. This can be seen in the numerous performances by Argentinean doc groups that theatricalise the dances and café chantants of the Porteñi and that, since the time when a forerunner such as 'Tangueros' debuted in Rovereto (1992), are well represented in all Italian winter and summer posters. On the earth-covered stage of 'Valser' (Bausch also chose this material for her mournful 'Sacre du Printemps'), the dancers intertwine their legs whirling and gliding laced, raising clouds of dust, in the multifaceted game of seduction, which is tinged with all the endlessly changing nuances between the most aggressive battle and the most poignant tenderness, with the sense of a pagan and sacred rite of passion-patience and mutual erotic overpowering, pulsating eternal and boundless between echoes of rumba and flamenco. "Valser" "The artistic journey of "Valser" is characterised by the encounter of several themes that may seem unconnected to each other: furious, dragged, tender, gay, beautiful, sensible, slapped, muddy, seductive, intimate, fragile, disorder, fierce, proud, dirty, smashed, animal, duality. Establishing order from chaos without betraying chaos, playing on ambivalence, making what is thought incompatible arise from the same source. Violence in affection, desire in repulsion, without embellishments; all this in the same play and at the same time'.
Catherine Berbessou
