t u m u l u s is a boundless procession of thirteen dancing and singing bodies within the same practice, and as part of the same gesture. Resulting from a collaboration between François Chaignaud and Geoffrey Jourdain, director of Cris de Paris, this project aims to combine these two arts and to think of dance and music together. Tumuli were once graves underneath a hill. A peculiar type of burial, these “pieces” house as many bodies of the dead as the afterlife that pushes through them. The research that leads this project resides at the heart of this paradox: a dead always contains life. In the middle of the set, a mound takes over the space. It is covered in greenery; it is, simultaneously, a mausoleum and a landscape. It is a volume onto which the dancers-singers and the singers-dancers climb, hide, and flow.
Dancing—an uninterrupted succession of figures which are powerful yet miserable, grotesque yet gracious—traverses the body, like the uncoiling images of a low-relief. This is, for us, an ode to transition, to flow, and to plasticity. An essential trait of our dramaturgy is linked to the breath, a vector and sculptor of sounds, melodies, and figures. Singing and gestures are experienced like air constructions which create tension between those who molt and those who vanish, what petrifies and what stays. Muscles, voices, and diaphragms are the matter of a tangible experience of everlasting transition. In the diffusion of air, we seek to engender a perception of what is invisible and that allows us to move. Our musical repertoire is made of polyphonic, acapella songs in Franco-Flemish, Italian and German drawn from different historical times, ranging from the Renaissance to the 1970s. Their religious imprint stands for the ways of feeling collectively, as well as for a movement toward its transcendence.
Music, here, rather than being experienced as a monument that crystallizes bodies in bliss or deference, is a wave that pierces and connects us to what never stops changing, deteriorating, and rising. Music is a vestige, a trace that circulates among the interpreters. It is a breeding ground for sensibilities and imaginaries for our voices; a vehicle to invent new forms to relate, to care, to be aware. Diffused breaths and the uninterrupted procession are rhythms that produce shapes whether they are fleeting, fragile or temporary. By so doing, t u m u l u s becomes a community of artists who share, from death, the delight of ageing and of impermanence. Together, they constitute a musical edifice that celebrates those who are absent through the new movements that allow our bodies to accomplish.
Baudouin Woehl