In over 30 years of creation, Raimund Hoghe has never ceased to transcend the beauty of simple things. Ornella Balestra, Takashi Ueno, Emmanuel Eggermont and Luca Giacomo Schulte, who have worked closely with the choreographer, revisit these materials to share the themes that are dear to Raimund Hoghe, the great classics (Ravel’s Bolero, Swan Lake…) and more topical subjects such as the migrant crisis… Rather than melancholy, Simple Things opens up a privileged path of access to this artistic universe that is as singular as it is necessary.
January 20th – 21st, 2025 Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Paris March 12th – 13th, 2025 Le Gymnase CDCN de Roubaix, Roubaix April 2nd – 3rd, 2025 CCAM, Vandoeuvre April 23rd – 24th, 2025 Pôle Sud CDCN Strasbourg, Strasbourg 75 minutes
As a true danced elegy, this piece questions lineage in the choreographic field through the prism of over fifteen years of collaboration with the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, who passed away in 2021. Aiming to shine a light on how this generation of creators continues to influence us, Emmanuel Eggermont revisits fragments of pieces woven from moments suspended in time, in which love and death act in the background, articulating them with other personal materials in order to imagine new writings.
In About Love and Death, it is both the iconographic and musical palette of Raimund Hoghe and the living kinesthesia of the imagination of Emmanuel Eggermont that are expressed. From fantasy of a fantasized fauna to the comical elegance of a Gene Kelly dancing in the rain by way of the syncopated energy of a Josephine Baker, this danced medley is accompanied by new sequences that multiply evocations, leading up to the incarnation of the ghost of Raimund Hoghe himself.
The ramified writing of this elegy-toned collection reveals an entire panel of references offering to all audiences, particularly those experiencing it for the first time, a path to access this unique and necessary universe in the panorama of the history of dance.
There are hints of dancehall dutty wine whirls, or sexy pelvis swaying. The movements are always ambivalent: they range between vulnerable, violent and ecstatic, yet become mechanical and ‘empty’ through numerous repetitions.
Batty Bwoyis a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius.
Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “ Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.
Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.
Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent being that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy!
The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.
