Around a large table, the “spectator guests” are invited to take their seats right up beside the dance. “A dance topside and underside, made and remade, written and rewritten” in the words of Claude Brumachon, who has sought in this show to “plunge the public into the heart of the matter”, to experiment with it a proximity bordering on promiscuity. “Be with the skin, under the skin and feel the respiration, the breathing, the breath! Feel (…) the quality of movement that flows, with in your ears the sound wave of the echo of the fleeing gesture.” 

 Unfurling in rapid phases in a succession of entangled tableaux, Le Festin questions the mechanisms of our consumer society “that devours everything” and that “fatal” and “repetitive” daily life to which people submit. In this dinner where the menu is alive, Claude Brumachon delivers up to the public the dancers “in the state of things” “goods ready to be consumed”. 

 “The table is served and cleared. My dish: my dancer. Guests whose only meal is the raw energy of an artist in action. The action of the gift of self, the offering of one’s life, of one’s body, in a multitude of instants dissected and mixed.”

Claude Brumachon was born in 1959, in Rouen. After attending Fine Arts where drawing directed him down the path of bodies, he took up dance at the age of seventeen with « les Ballets de la Cité » led by Catherine Atlani, he stayed there for two years.

In 1981, Claude Brumachon met Benjamin Lamarche in Paris, they immediately started a collaborative and original research. Together, they explored that new world opening up through the dancing body.

Claude Brumachon between 1980 and 1983, as for him, worked with Christine Gérard (La Pierre Fugitive), Karine Saporta and Brigitte Farges.

As they belonged to no school in particular and as they rejected none, Claude and Benjamin sealed their agreement with a first duet : Niverolles Duo du col in 1982.

With their first group, the « Rixes » company in 1984, they invented a stylized, vehement and passionate choreographic writing: a sharp and brisk gesture, a tormented tenderness. They surrounded themselves with dancers, a composer, a makeup artist and a costume designer: Founding a troupe and leading it to creation.

In four years’ time, the choreographer created ten plays with two major ones (1988): Texane (award-winning at the Bagnolet contest) and Le Piédestal des vierges which set their style to a recognizable gesture. It quickly followed on sequences of cleat-cut and sharp movements cutting the body and the space.

The choreographer carved out a reputation. In 1989, Folie came to the fore and was a great success again. That success has been repeated 7 years later in 1996, with Icare (presented at the 50th Festival d’Avignon), a solo written for Benjamin Lamarche.

Sometimes groping, sometimes rushing headlong, Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche imagine and create new worlds. There‘s never any doubt between them, doubts are about dancing, about the ways of dancing, about the continuing questioning of this moving body the mind is obsessed with.

The teaching of their dance is made through training, lessons are made as much to pass on this brand new knowledge as to refine it. Moments to unite the group under a common body language. To understand is also to make understand.

As an expression of desire – passionate – and of an overflowing sensuality to a certain point that it was sometimes described as violent, their plays are tales of the inexpressible, they are mirrors of raging inner worlds, pushed beyond their own rules. Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche have become researchers in poetic and powerful movements. They’ve been creating a dance alternately full of energy and tormented, lyric and passionate, now high-spirited and romantic and now down to earth and meaningful.

Out of Molière’s wanderings, they made with Histoire d’Argan le Visionnaire (2007) a bright and facetious show as a tribute to the artist. Out of the consumer society, they made a Festin (2004), carnal and sensual where proximity bursts out at the face of the audience. With Phobos (2007), they ventured into irrational, universal or shallow fears.

Claude and Benjamin create from the body for the body and with the body.

Their dances are as much stories of different groups that share a space to live in as they are stories of loneliness facing the world. They all are a research around an irrational gesture that calls for the precise one, necessary and full of meaning.

A gesture, heavy with an unspeakable story that changes into the very moment and, in a sometimes bitter statement, offers a view of man in his complexity.

Claude Brumachon signed more than eighty original choreographies with his own dancers, dancers from other French or foreign ballets, with schools and with children as well.

They directed the National Choreographic Centre of Nantes to the creation in 1992 to 2015. Since January 1, 2016 they continue their choreographic road with their new company SOUS LA PEAU.

Source : Brumachon-Lamarche

More information :

https://www.brumachon-lamarche.fr/

Author, filmmaker and video artist Charles Picq (1952-2012) entered working life in the 70s through theatre and photography. A- fter resuming his studies (Maîtrise de Linguistique - Lyon ii, Maîtrise des sciences et Techniques de la Communication - grenoble iii), he then focused on video, first in the field of fine arts at the espace Lyonnais d'art Contemporain (ELAC) and with the group « Frigo », and then in dance.
   On creation of the Maison de la Danse in Lyon in 1980, he was asked to undertake a video documentation project that he has continued ever since. During the ‘80s, a decade marked in France by the explosion of contemporary dance and the development of video, he met numerous artists such as andy Degroat, Dominique Bagouet, Carolyn Carlson, régine Chopinot, susanne Linke, Joëlle Bouvier and regis Obadia, Michel Kelemenis. He worked in the creative field with installations and on-stage video, as well as in television with recorded shows, entertainment and documentaries.

His work with Dominique Bagouet (80-90) was a unique encounter. He documents his creativity, assisting with Le Crawl de Lucien and co-directing with his films Tant Mieux, Tant Mieux and 10 anges. in the 90s he became director of video development for the Maison de la Danse and worked, with the support of guy Darmet and his team, in the growing space of theatre video through several initiatives:
       - He founded a video library of dance films with free public access. This was a first for France. Continuing the video documentation of theatre performances, he organised their management and storage.
       - He promoted the creation of a video-bar and projection room, both dedicated to welcoming school pupils.
       - He started «présentations de saisons» in pictures.
       - He oversaw the DVD publication of Le tour du monde en 80 danses, a pocket video library produced by the Maison de la Danse for the educational sector.

       - He launched the series “scènes d'écran” for television and online. He undertook the video library's digital conversion and created Numeridanse.

His main documentaries are: enchaînement, Planète Bagouet, Montpellier le saut de l'ange, Carolyn Carlson, a woman of many faces, grand ecart, Mama africa, C'est pas facile, Lyon, le pas de deux d'une ville, Le Défilé, Un rêve de cirque.

He has also produced theatre films: Song, Vu d'ici (Carolyn Carlson), Tant Mieux, Tant Mieux, 10 anges, Necesito and So schnell, (Dominique Bagouet), Im bade wannen, Flut and Wandelung (Susanne Linke), Le Cabaret Latin (Karine Saporta), La danse du temps (Régine Chopinot), Nuit Blanche (Abou Lagraa), Le Témoin (Claude Brumachon), Corps est graphique (Käfig), Seule et WMD (Françoise et Dominique Dupuy), La Veillée des abysses (James Thiérrée), Agwa (Mourad Merzouki), Fuenteovejuna (Antonio Gades), Blue Lady revistied (Carolyn Carlson).

Source: Maison de la Danse de Lyon