The Choreopolitics of Alain Platel's les ballets C de la B

Emotions, Gestures, Politics

Christel Stalpaert, Guy Cools, Hildegard De Vuyst

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350080027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Les Ballets C de la B was founded by Alain Platel in 1984. Since then it has become a company that enjoys great success at home and abroad. Over the years, Platel has developed a unique choreographic oeuvre. His motto, 'This dance is for the world and the world is for everyone', reveals a deep social and political commitment. Through the three topics of emotions, gestures and politics, this book unravels the choreopolitics of Platel's Les Ballets C de la B. His choreopolitics go beyond conveying a (political) message because rather than defending one opinion, Platel is more concerned about the exposure of the complexity within the debate itself. Highly respected scholars from different fields contribute to this book to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the intense emotions, the damaged narratives, and the precarious bodies in Platel's choreographic oeuvre.

1

Introduction

Christel Stalpaert, Guy Cools and Hildegard De Vuyst

Different from a lot of his generational peers, until now no publication existed that brings together the critical discourse on the work of Flemish choreographer Alain Platel and his les ballets C de la B. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, Platel himself always resisted the canonization of his work and often preferred a more informal discourse of personal contacts or letters sent to him publicly or privately. Another reason is that the diversity of his work has attracted an equally diverse critical discourse that not only crosses the borders of the art disciplines – theatre, dance, music theatre and opera – but also wanders into fields such as psychoanalysis or queer studies. As editors of this book, we wanted to fill this gap and bring together a diversity of points of view. Most of the articles included have been commissioned for this volume, but some have been republished because of their iconic nature.

We believe that art criticism (even scholarly and academic) should not only reflect on the work it discusses but that it should also attempt to translate some of its formal characteristics into the language and registers used. As such, this volume brings together not only a diversity of topics but also experiments with a diversity of stylistic approaches and text formats.

The three editors have been privileged witnesses of the full thirty years of Platel’s career from the early 1980s until today, with different levels of proximity. Hildegard De Vuyst has been Platel’s dramaturg for more than two decades, and in 2016 she joined the company as coordinator of the residency programme Co-laBo. Guy Cools has dialogued with Platel’s body of work as a critic, as its presenter and co-producer and as the dramaturg of some of Platel’s ‘offspring’. Theatre scholar Christel Stalpaert teaches at the university theatre department in Ghent, Platel’s home turf. As a result of this proximity, the texts in the book oscillate between a subjective point of view that allows us to offer unique insights in Platel’s thoughts and working methodologies and a critical distance that allows us to look at different aspects of his work, applying a broad range of critical theories. We hope that the polyphony of voices will guide the readers in Platel’s universe and have them (re)discover both its diversity and complexity.

The identity politics of the Flemish Wave

Alain Platel founded les ballets C de la B in 1984 with a group of like-minded friends and colleagues. As such, he is part of the first generation of artists, together with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, Josse De Pauw, Jan Decorte, Eric De Volder, Guy Cassiers, Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval and Arne Sierens, who were hyped as the Flemish Wave in Flanders, Belgium. The theatre-makers conquered the Netherlands; the dance-makers conquered the international dance stages from the 1980s onwards. The notion of ‘Flemish Wave’ was a construction of identity politics, created by marketing departments and the media, picked up by culture politics and originally also endorsed by the artists themselves. In their contribution to the book Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity, the Flemish sociologists Pascal Gielen and Rudi Laermans argue that the ‘Flemish wave’ rhetoric was a conscious, discursive strategy of this new generation of artists to eventually obtain more financial support. Claiming a regional ‘authenticity’ was only one side of that discursive strategy. These choreographers were simultaneously legitimized by a careful inscription in an existing, international dance canon.

In our view, the crucial link in the success story of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus or, more recently, Alain Platel was the powerful combination of selective references to internationally acknowledged ‘models’ or ‘styles’ with an international recognition as original choreographers by leading festivals and foreign critics. The latter was a pivotal argument in the struggle against the long-standing dominance of the ballet tradition in Flanders, especially around the mid-1980s.¹

The acknowledgement of a common Flemish identity clearly had a strategic dimension, and from the 1990s onwards it was picked up by the official cultural politics. Even if most artists of the Flemish Wave continued to assert their ‘Belgitude’ and their solidarity with the other regions, they could not completely escape being used as ‘cultural ambassadors’ for a growing, Flemish, nationalist identity.

At the same time, each of these choreographers continued to develop a unique, personal signature, embedded in an even more locally specific context. With PARTS, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker recreated her version of Maurice Béjart’s Mudra, investing her own symbolic capital in educating the next generation of dance artists and by doing so establishing Brussels as one of the epicentres of the contemporary dance scene at the turn of the millennium.

As a result, Flanders and Brussels have become attractive living and working places for foreign dancers and choreographers, who often came to work with one of the choreographers mentioned above. Dance critic Pieter T’Jonck reflected on these recent developments in contemporary dance in Flanders as ‘the best measure to evaluate the quality and the international character of the Flemish dance’. He concludes, ‘the diversity of new choreographers proves that the nomination of “Flemish Dance” has less and less to do with the nationality of choreographers and dancers, and more and more, or even exclusively with where the dance has been created, that is in Flanders’.²

Alain Platel put his home town Ghent on the international dance map. Its history as an anarchistic opposition to the dominant powers of both emperor and church resembles his own rebellious attitude, while its contemporary, urban landscape became a major source of inspiration for his scenic universes. Using his daily walks and bike rides through Ghent as a creative input, Platel has developed a unique choreographic oeuvre, faithfully following his motto, ‘this dance belongs to the world and the world belongs to everybody’.

Alain Platel’s choreopolitics

Against the reductive identity politics of the ‘Flemish Wave’ construction, we propose in this book the concept of choreopolitics, originally used by dance scholar André Lepecki in ‘Choreopolice and Choreopolitics; or, The Task of the Dancer’ (2013). By introducing the concept of choreopolitics in dance studies, Lepecki redefined choreography and released it conceptually from imperative, normative or ‘policed’ constructions of movement, such as the identity politics described above, which narrow down a complex and multiple artistic identity to only one of its aspects. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy, one could say that choreopolicing is concerned with controlling movements, with channelling and directing movements in a confined space, while choreopolitics is more concerned with redistributing habitual and legitimate ways of moving in time and space. It takes part in ‘the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time’.³ Following Hannah Arendt’s observations on freedom, Lepecki considers choreopolitics a way ‘to move politically’, ‘as expressions of freedom’.⁴ ‘Arendt’s fragment persists, resonates, unsettles, stirs. Its afterlife expresses and beckons a challenge and a provocation that are both political and kinetic – in one word “choreopolitical” – a challenge we must answer … of imagining and enacting a politics of movement as a choreopolitics of freedom.’⁵

Platel meets Arendt’s challenge to move politically in his consistent open way of choreographing. He does not consider it to be ‘an art of command’.⁶ As Lepecki observed, this choreopolicing is a system of command that ‘implements, needs, produces, and reproduces whole systems of obedience’.⁷ Rather than having his dancers and performers obey his commands, Platel has ‘learned to wait. Which in turn gives people the confidence to participate in the creative process.’⁸ Platel is not a movement controller. As his dramaturg Hildegard De Vuyst phrases it in this edited volume, ‘he consistently refuses to be the great watch-maker who has the cogs perfectly under control’. To put it in Lepecki’s words, Platel’s choreopolitics with les ballets C de la B always remains ‘an open movement, not of commands and their implementation (as in policies), but a movement of the political itself – crisscrossing the multitude, converging divergences, aimed at freedom’.⁹

On a conceptual level, the consistent openness in Platel’s choreopolitics also tackles (political) issues concerned with notions of identity, gender and nation(ality). However, Platel’s art is not political in its message, nor in the identities it stages or the feelings the performance invokes concerning social and political questions. Political art is not the area of the pamphleteer. For Rancière, ‘the “fictions” of art and politics are … heterotopias rather than utopias’.¹⁰ Platel’s choreopolitics with les ballets C de la B is hence to be considered as more than conveying a (political) message. Rather than defending one opinion, Platel is more concerned with the exposure of the complexity within the debate itself.

In order to show that complexity, but also to offer the reader tools to untangle it, we have organized the contributions in this book around four interrelated topics: its multiple dramaturgies, the emotions it consciously evokes, the precarious bodies and gestures it represents and its more overt politics of damaged narratives and inclusiveness. These four themes are necessarily interwoven. The way in which Platel organizes his company and his creative process; the priority he continues to give to an emotional response and reception of his work; and the types of bodies and gestures he gives prevalence to are all equal parts of his choreopolitics, as much as any more overtly political content or message.

Rather than vainly attempting an exhaustive description of Platel’s body of work, each chapter zooms in on one or a couple of productions that are particularly relevant for the topics under scrutiny. In each of the four sections of the book, the texts are loosely organized so that the discussed productions give some sense of the chronology of the whole oeuvre.

Multiple dramaturgies

The first part, Multiple Dramaturgies, gives an insight into Platel’s collaborative and creative working methods in which he follows a ‘decentred dramaturgy’. In this working method, he shares the responsibility of his work with all his collaborators, in the first place his dancers. In his contribution, dramaturg Guy Cools observes how Platel’s artistic trajectory evolved from working with untrained amateur performers to highly trained, specialized, professional performers whose virtuosic control of their own bodies is used to embody the hypersensitivity and often lack of control of damaged bodies, such as one often finds in psychiatry.

Using as a main source, next to the work itself, the many public interviews he did with Alain Platel, Cools first considers Platel’s viewpoint and working method all through the 1990s, for such as Bonjour madame, comment allez-vous aujourd’hui, il fait beau, il va sans doute pleuvoir, etcetera (1993), La Tristeza Complice (1995) and Iets op Bach (1998). Drawing on a public talk with Platel at Sadler’s Wells in 2011, he focuses on the aesthetic and political vision behind the works he created in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Out of Context – for Pina (2010) and Gardenia (2010), two very distinct but related works, while throwing sideways glances at vsprs and pitié! He unfolds his notion of a dramaturgy of stuttering to touch upon the particular poetics of their gestures.

Katalin Trencsényi further unfolds Platel’s open choreopolitical way of working as ‘collaborative democracy’. Drawing on interviews that she did with the ensemble, Trencsényi presents and analyses not only the performers’ creative process but also the dramaturgical collaboration between Alain Platel and Hildegard De Vuyst. This contribution first places Platel’s particular way of collaborating with dramaturgs in a historical context, referring to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater and to the wider development of dance dramaturgy as developed by, amongst others, Marianne Van Kerkhoven.

Platel and De Vuyst share a process-oriented way of working. Trencsényi introduces the notion of the ‘dramaturg-as-translator’, after Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator, to describe the labour of the dramaturg in negotiating between different companies, between different media (music, dance and theatre) and between individuals in group dynamics. Platel’s choreopolitics here comes to the fore in the body-politics of the performers, echoing Van Kerkhoven’s notion of the macro- and the micro-dramaturgy.

Zooming into some productions, such as Out of Context – for Pina (2010) and nicht schlafen (2016), Trencsényi further traces the development of the ensemble’s ‘unruly’ collaborative dramaturgy. This ‘unruly’ dramaturgy dares to take risks, not only in its choice of dancers but also in mixing different movement vocabularies. Of particular interest is Platel’s Blickregie; this watching together generates a particular mode of co-creating that Trencsényi connects with a particular politics and ethics of democracy.

Dramaturg Hildegard De Vuyst has a special place in this edited volume. Since their first collaboration, La Tristeza Complice (1995), she has not only accompanied all of Platel’s creations as a production dramaturg but she has also substantially contributed to the discourse that accompanies the work. She does so in her own, unique voice, which, similarly to Platel, not only rationalizes but also follows her own gut feelings. Throughout this book, she is given the opportunity to articulate the underlying ideology of Platel’s choreopolitics from an insider’s dramaturgical perspective.

In her first contribution, Hildegard De Vuyst puts Alain Platel’s early choreographic work in its context. The text is presented as a historical document, as it was a speech on the occasion of the seventh Prix Europe Nouvelles Théâtrales that was awarded to Alain Platel in Taormina (Italy) on 8 April 2001. It observes how les ballets C de la B arose out of the wasteland of a non-existing contemporary dance landscape in 1984 and how it experienced its international breakthrough only in 1993 with Bonjour madame. De Vuyst considers Platel’s early work, consisting of two trilogies, as a consistent oeuvre. The first trilogy – Moeder en Kind, Bernadetje and Allemaal Indiaan – deals with conflicts in a family context. The second trilogy, Bonjour madame, La Tristeza Complice and Iets op Bach – deals with semi-public spheres in which stories meet and clash. Already in these early works, she observes Platel’s refusal to reconcile opposites: ‘Platel’s world is not neatly divided into sheep and wolves; a man is also a woman, and nothing can ever be only beautiful. He embraces the contrasts and brings extremes together’, she writes in her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Christel Stalpaert, Guy Cools and Hildegard De Vuyst
• Part One Multiple Dramaturgies
• Part Two Emotions
• Part Three Gestures
• Part Four Politics
• Index
• Imprint