REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents MUETTE By Boris Charmatz

Boris Charmatz dances with discomfort. His work Muette, now in performance at the Festival d'Avignon's La Chartreuse, offers no easy viewing. Earthy movement, prolonged silence, and nudity combine in an unsettling yet riveting exploration of the body. Charmatz seeks to dance the interior self, a self uninterested in the elegant virtuosity he could no doubt display. Within this year's Avignon program, Muette stands as one of its most demanding aesthetic challenges. To an untrained eye, the work could easily be dismissed as pseudo-Butoh avant-gardism, an affectation that resembles a child rolling on the floor crying, "Look at me, Mommy." Yet Charmatz has so carefully shaped his movement vocabulary and the evening's dramatic progression that the performance accumulates into a deliberate and lasting artistic argument.

The performance space is bathed in harsh yellow fluorescent light, fabulously designed by Yves Godin. Strips of tubing extend from the upstage wall through the audience like a spine, rendering everyone in the room grey and pallid. Charmatz enters to near silence, interrupted only by the occasional cough or rustle of a program. Dressed in black, he crosses to the upstage left corner, pressing himself against the wall like a child in timeout. He slowly undresses before entering the space marked by two striking details: a heart painted across his torso and a bubble of saliva that remains suspended in his mouth throughout the opening sequence.

His face proves every bit as expressive as his body. What lies between the grin and the grimace? At times, he smiles with the mischievous innocence of an imp or cherub; at others, he writhes in agony, clawing at his face with an intensity reminiscent of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Saliva gradually accumulates until, later in the performance, he rubs his stomach, producing a wet squelching sound that reverberates through the auditorium. Yet amid this deliberate grotesquerie, Charmatz repeatedly arrives at moments of startling sculptural beauty. These brief suspensions, where the body settles into an impossible stillness, offer islands of grace within the work's relentless physicality.

If the silence never relents, the lighting eventually does. Midway through the performance, the fluorescent lights over the audience disappear as the stage shifts into cool blue tones. The work transforms from something resembling a gallery installation into a theatrical event. What initially implicates the audience through shared exposure gives way to the more familiar comfort of voyeurism. Charmatz continues to beguile and confound. Although the performance carries the appearance of improvisation, every movement seems guided by a rigorous internal logic. Naked onstage, he explores the grotesque without allowing it to collapse into mere provocation. Instead, he discovers an unexpected aesthetic richness within it.

Photo Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

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