A Nouveau festival / Vidéodanse

This profoundly reworked edition of Vidéodanse, entitled "Oublier la danse" is being held this year as part of the Nouveau Festival. It shows how the "Return to Oblivion" (Michel de Certeau) is expressed in contemporary dance. The relationship with memory, oblivion and reminiscence is one of the main issues underlying every choreographic gesture, in creating the tension of a movement that is constantly reinvented, only to be reinvented further. Every choreography contains this tension, through what is involved in its relationship between time and the body. Contemporary dance is also constructed from a wide range of archives (written notation; photographic and video images). They are often less preserved and present, because like performance, the body's memory is central to dance; a body which is the conveyor of a story and is in itself an "archive", and simultaneously the memory and forgetting of the movement, the past and the present.

From a selection of over forty dance films by choreographers of different generations (including Dominique Bagouet, Odile Duboc, Dominique Brun, Catherine Diverrès, Olivier Dubois, Cristian Duarte, Olga de Soto, Foofwa d’Imobilité, Loïc Touzé, Rita Quaglia and Rachid Ouramdane), together with a choice of films linked with contemporary creation and notably performance, Vidéodanse addresses the aspects of transmission, performance and the relationship with History involved in contemporary dance. How do choreographers envisage passing on the memory and heritage of their work? How do they decide to reinterpret and relay works in the repertory, creations by choreographers who have died, or choreographies that have influenced them? How does dance work on a personal and collective history, and bear witness to it?

Choreographers, performers, historians and dance critics open each daily film-show session: living speakers testifying to an active memory.

"Oublier la danse" – this title with the order crossed out, which should be read as "do not forget dance" – aims to go in the very opposite direction of oblivion. As an approach, it takes dance historian Laurence Louppe's description "The most essential thing for us, obviously, is what is doomed to oblivion, the very flesh of the work, its text, the danced movement, whose material tends to fade the most quickly from the memory" (Poétique de la danse contemporaine, Contredanse, Brussels, 1997). Built up around a selection of films shown in an especially designed area,"Oublier la danse" offers an approach to the format of the exhibition in dance. It places the question of the memory's persistency and what can be a choreographic archive at the heart of this approach, rethinking and going beyond the idea of the impossibility of being remembered, to which we believe dance is doomed.

By Valérie da Costa, curator of Vidéodanse