«When I was quite young I began dancing with the Paris Opera Ballet; I left when I was a young adult, feeling I was escaping a forest of movements and gestures to move more toward dance. That journey has now lasted over thirty years, and I’ve lost my way a few times, been overwhelmed, I doubted some of my choices – and I learned to find and to recognize the subtle spaces where dance really happens. I understood that dance often happens in one particular situation – when the dancer pulls back, as though there’s not enough space onstage for the dance and the dancer at the same time. This paradox is, for a performer, the most difficult thing to cope with. 

Encountering the dancers of the CCN Ballet de Lorraine, creating a piece with them, will be like returning to the forest and the beginning of my journey. I remember the words of Gilles Deleuze: ‘The forest is not defined by a shape, instead it is defined by its power, the power to make its trees grow, until it can go no further.’ My only question for that forest is not: what is your shape, what is your delineation? My only question is therefore: what is your power? Meaning: how far will you go? 

Creating a dance means dealing with something larger than the self, making our movements active and empowering, inventing a destination, reaching somewhere or someone. It also involves taking a leap outside the self, risking hesitation, wavering, clumsiness. Once they have been created, what happens to these dances, where do they go? Will they continue to affect people, events, ideas? 

Before setting a subject, a theme or an idea, I need to meet the dancers who will be performing the piece we will be creating together. There are of course a few precursor thoughts, this idea of Antiphon the sophist. the arrythmiston, meaning the unarranged, the unformed, something free of structure, that which is the most fundamental in a being, the passive material which receives the rhythm. 

This is where we will find the musicality of the work, in the hollow space which we will create so that a movement will come to fill it. From our exchanges the dances will be created, we will follow them, tuning them to each other and building the piece.» 

Loïc Touzé