Somnole

How do you come out of your winter sleep ? What may have been caused by the isolation ? And what are we going to find when we go outside ? With humour and intelligence, Boris Charmatz embodies his highly personal end of our collective confinement. A solo that slumbers, intimately and nonchalantly, between inside and outside, between dream and consciousness.

“I love it when choreographic ideas come to my body when I lie down or fall asleep” says Charmatz.  “I would like to make a sleepy solo inspired by this latent situation, to investigate the winter sleep and the awakening, the repercussion of daydreaming and the longing for passivity.” Hence the title Somnole, a state between 'veille' and 'sommeil', between sleep and watchfulness.

At the same time Charmatz returns to his childhood, when during breaks he continuously whistled classical music. On that basis, he could even imagine a complete whistling concert. Those pieces of melody that go around in your head form a world in itself, a familiar hiding-place, which play a special part in this piece. 'Somnole' is a fragile solo for the large stage. An intimate connection between breath and movement.

Boris Charmatz is one of the key figures of contemporary dance in France. In 2009 Charmatz was appointed director of the Centre choréographique national de Rennes et de Bretagne, which he converted into an innovative dance museum, the Musée de la danse.