GIANNA VALENTI | In the following text, Alain Platel — internationally renowned choreographer and director who has profoundly shifted with his work the history of Western theatrical dance — writes about his life and career, from the early experiments with a group of friends to the foundation of les ballets C de la B in 1984, from the success of a new relational and choreographic model to the internationalization of his work beyond the Belgian borders, up to his most recent research in the post-covid era. A narrative that is both artistic and personal and that reflects the main identity of his choreographic blueprint: the human as the leading dramaturgical focus and the richness and uniqueness of each performer/person as the deep reason for being of every creation and as the guiding principle to the composition of the materials.
Platel has responded with this text to my invitation to leave a testimony on the essence of his creative path, on that unique creative frequency that he has embodied in the world of dance and which has had — and continues to have — an impact on the world at large through his works. Among the proposals I had made, he has chosen to write “a letter to the future”, a form of communication that allows a space of reflection for both the writer and the recipient: a sort of Time Capsule for the future of choreography and humanity.
I’m happy to have received it. He has written it for all of us and I hand it over to you.
Officially, I’ve already been “retired” for three years, but it was only last summer, after the presentation of one of our last creations, Mein Gent, that it became real: to wake up on August 3rd 2024 realizing, for the first time in 40 years, that I had no urgent responsibilities and that nobody was expecting anything from me… I can recommend it! That’s how it was during those last summer months, when my companion Isnelle, our dog Kito and I celebrated it with a beer nearly every evening on our terrace!
As it was well known, and often questioned, that I rarely appeared on stage after a performance, it was no surprise that I didn’t want a goodbye party and that I even threatened to walk away from it if anybody would organize one. They knew I was bloody serious about that, so nobody tried!
When I look back and zoom out, I’m amazed at everything that has happened with me in these last forty years. Because… in reality, I’m quite shy and insecure as a person, so to become in a certain way and to be at certain times so exposed, was often very contradictory to who I feel I am. But above all, my first ambition in the eighties was to become a good Orthopedagogue (remedial teacher), because that’s what I had studied, Psychology and Pedagogics. And when in the mid eighties we started making little performances with friends, it was mainly to have a reason to get together, drink cheap wine, smoke cigarettes and talk about how we would change the world.
Very inspired by the German choreographer Pina Bausch (who used her dancers’ personal histories as an inspiration for her performances) and by the French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (who decided to live with children with a severe mental disorder instead of working with them in psychiatric hospitals), I started making performances that were poor copies of scenes inspired by Bausch’s Café Müller and as there were no social media in those days, we could easily get away with that. Some Flemish young theater directors followed and presented our work, but since there was no money, all of us had to find a real job elsewhere just to survive.
In those years, we had the chance to grow and develop gradually an original physical language that was described as chaotic and unprofessional but — to my own surprise — audiences liked it and professional dancers started to be curious to work with us.
As a child and adolescent, I followed some mime, theater and dance workshops, but none of them with the ambition to become a professional. So when I started to “direct” my peers in our first performances, I could never show them what to do and how to do it and I was depending on our limited skills and original proposals. As we had no artistic education, we could care less about conventions, rules or trends. On top of that, there were no fathers to kill in the Belgian performing arts. There was only an old fashioned ballet company and the famous choreographer Maurice Béjart just left the country for Switzerland. No history, no money and only a few alternative spaces to present our performances.
Our work in those years was provocative, very physical, had no specific and recognizable style and was inspired by the anger of the young people who performed it (remember … we were living the Punk era), and it was a very attractive work for some professional dancers who wanted to escape the dull classical world.
There was a moment that I had to choose between an artistic path and my engagements as a pedagogue, because combining both was no longer possible. I decided to take the artistic risk and we created the company Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique — les ballets C de la B — an ironic name for a company that was only the opposite of what was expressed in its name: a collective of different non professionals who had the ambition to create physical performances inspired by the personality of the performers.
Very early in my “career” I knew that if I wanted to make statements about the world in our performances — because that’s how arrogant and pretentious we were — the world had to be seen on stage. That’s why, in the first place, our casts had to be very diversified —(non)professionals, different (cultural) backgrounds, different age, sex, gender, color, abilities…
I was very glad that this diversity was rarely mentioned by critics, even though in those days the European dance casts were very white. It meant that this diversity, maybe, wasn’t an issue and represented a reality, while nowadays, it’s one of the major criteria to judge a company or a performance.
In searching on how I could engage with these very diverse casts, I developed a “method” that worked pretty well: I asked the performers to create personal dance phrases around certain themes. And in fact any theme seemed to work. If you ask a dancer to create a “green” phrase, he/she will certainly come up with something, but always it will be inspired and influenced by their personal background. A ballet dancer will create something ballet-ish, a club dancer something club-ish. But if you then ask the ballet dancer to re-interpret the club phrase he/she will come up with something which is neither ballet nor club dancing. The same question could be asked to kids and non professionals and professional dancers loved to work with them! In that way we started to develop a “style” that I described as bastard dance. We discovered this had endless possibilities, in fact we could create as many genres as many people there were.
I never had a clear idea to start with. Sometimes there was the music of a composer, a stunning set, a series of vague themes or something other that would inspire us, but there was always a specific cast. The performers were the core business. They were asked many (personal) questions (Pina Bausch’ working method) and were invited to improvise around themes I proposed or that they themselves proposed. In constant dialogue with the cast we did then decide what to keep and what to continue to work on the next day and what to leave. Gradually a performance “appeared” and seldom it was something we had imagined at the beginning of the process. A scary but very adventurous process with one main goal: each performer had to be very visible.
It took me a while before I dared to introduce my personal background into the creation processes. From time to time I would mention my experiences as a pedagogue who worked with children with mental or physical difficulties, but only later I showed films and pictures about them (medical documentaries of psychiatric patients at the beginning of the 20th Century and Fernand Deligny’s films Ce gamin là and Le Moindre Geste were very inspiring). For a long time I think I was scared that the performers would make fun of this kind of humanity. But the contrary happened and they recognized an inner world which as dancers they were also looking for: when words don’t work anymore the body starts to talk… and often that language is harsh, less controlled and not “pretty”, but has an emotional effect on both the performers and the audiences.
Since I rarely created (dance) material and also made theater and music performances, as well as operas and film documentaries, I had difficulties to be called a choreographer. But when I realized that the word choreo also refers to a neurological disorder that effects the physical movements of the body… I could live with it.
Performers were engaged for one creation and stayed until the end of the tour (more or less one and a half to two years). Only at the end of the process did I decide — in dialogue with each of them — if it had sense to continue our collaboration or if we would (temporarily) end it. With some performers I worked for more than twenty years, others just passed by for one creation.
I’m not a traveller. I can see the whole world on the small spot where I live and during the daily walks with my dog. In the small book Je keek te ver (You looked too far), Marjoleine De Vos describes how she walks every day the same path around her village in the North of the Netherlands. She discovered the entire globe by doing so and didn’t need to make long journeys on the planet. If I would not have been a member of les ballets C de la B, probably I would not have traveled further than the Belgian coast or the Ardennes … but now I have seen half of the world! I feel extremely privileged.
During my journeys, while communicating with the different casts and also by meeting people on all of the continents, I recognized my shyness and insecurity (that I could hide better and better) in nearly everybody I met. In that sense I never felt unique or alone and I felt instead empowered.
In some places and on many occasions I also witnessed an extreme injustice I had never been confronted with in my personal life. That was the case in Brazil, Lithuania (in the early nineties), Timisoara, Moscow and Hong Kong, but also in the meeting with the Aboriginals in Australia, or by working in Bobo Dioulasso and Kinshasa and most of all in visiting the Occupied Territories since 2001.
The visits to the Occupied Territories overwhelmed me the most. Since the first workshop in Ramallah in 2001, I was struck by the open and very visable oppression and overall injustice in that area and I realized that the policy of the successive Israeli governments was supported by nearly a complete nation/ethnicity. I joined the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), an international non violent movement, mainly of academics and artists, that is pleading for the (economic) boycott of Israel as long as it remains an apartheid state. To take part in this BDS movement gradually became dangerous and threatening and during the last twenty years I have been insulted and humiliated on numerous occasions, I even received death threats (!) and I was censored and cancelled in certain environments.
If there is anything that left me frustrated at the end of my professional career, it must be that I couldn’t convince my colleagues to join the BDS movement or, at least, to be more outspoken in this tragedy. I knew, and know, how this so called local conflict can, will and already is dominating the development of the entire world politics. Are we evolving towards extreme right and tyrannic governments all over the planet or towards open minded and less nationalistic societies being aware that we all share the same small globe?
I believe I lived one of the most exciting eras in the history of Western contemporary dance. 1980 – 2020 has been a period during which all genres of contemporary dance took a high flight and Belgium was certainly one of the epicentra. With Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus, Meg Stuart and, later, also Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as important figures, Belgium has attracted many young dancers from all over the world. Since a decade though, we’re living a major shifting moment in societies on many levels. Urgent questions are being asked regarding social matters, ecology, economics, gender, diversity, leadership… and the performing arts join into the reflections on these themes which are causing important mindshifts into how performances are conceived, created and presented.
Especially after Covid, I was personally confronted with many doubts amongst my performers about the meaning and sense of dance as an art form. It seemed like in Western contemporary dance everything had been invented and tried out. Also, at the end, the human body has its own limits: one cannot run the 100 meters in zero seconds… That is why to be able to motivate dancers and explore their original passion for the métier sometimes wasn’t easy. But by asking them how they started dancing and by using their memories triggered by that question, one can be very surprised by the joy they are able to rediscover. This process has been the inspiration for the physical language we developed in our latest creations: Another Sacre (2021), C(H)OEURS (2022) and Ombra (2024).
When I reached the age of retirement, the continuation of les ballets C de la B — a company that had become associated with me as a director — was questioned. I never had aspirations to continue to live on, to work on a repertoire and I also wasn’t interested in finding a successor. We decided therefore to change the name, the artistic team and the goals of the company and les ballets C de la B has become laGeste. I retired, a new artistic direction was chosen and the new company focuses mainly on inclusive performative projects.
I remember a tag that at a certain time appeared on many toilets all over the world saying Killroy was here. Nobody ever knew who Killroy was, but apparently he/she had been there and at all those other places. It’s how I feel: I was/am here for a while, never had the real ambition to live what I live(d), but I can only look back with great surprise to what happened to me. Even though I love to live, I believe it’s a heavy burden knowing that there is only one exit: death.
So… no other message to the world than a quote about life from Fernand Deligny:
être-là
être cet être là
qui est avec un autre
et un autre
alors il te faut être là
tout simplement
et faire ce que tu as à faire
verbe vivant que tu es
to be there
to be this being
who is there with another being
and another
so you just have to be there
very simply
and do what you have to do
which is a proof that you’re there
Alain Platel
https://youtu.be/i9xXGqPkIYk?si=2l2J9Bvowh-vBAd3
Italian Text
Fare Coreografia ＃4: Alain Platel, no other message to the world
Credits
Author Alain Platel
Editor Gianna Valenti
PAC-Paneacquaculture.net
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