The moment after

by Marie-Christine Verney
journalist

“Dazed or obsessed, emptied out or tense … the photographer Grégoire Korganow photographed the dancers after their performances at the Montpellier Danse Festival. At peak moments of transition and vulnerability.
 
The photos are hung right on the stone walls, under the arches of the Cloister of the Agora, the cité internationale de la danse in Montpellier. They show dance, immobilized. On a black background, Korganow (who was a reporter for ten years for Libération) chose this instant, this “thickness,” as defined by the choreographer Matthieu Hocquemiller, at the moment the dancer comes off stage. He had never worked in this genre before, and it was quite a feather in his cap to be asked to be the sole invited photographer for the celebrated Montpellier Dance Festival. Korganow has however worked in the fashion world so he did have an idea of what he might be walking into -- before photographing the dancers after their performances at the festival, he would ask himself, “What am I looking to capture this time: the body as it falls? The body as a tool? An ordinary body?”
 
None of that came into the process; the series “Stage exit,” large portraits (2,10 m x 1,40, or 6.88’ x 4.59’) hung in the cloister, and the smaller ones (1,20 x 1,80 or 3.9’ x 5.9’) at the CCN, on the same site - is not a catalogue, but a kind of choreography which brings together the dancers as if in a new company. The work is about the space between the bodies and the time -- suspended here in the “AND” -- the downbeats of dance as it is counted (“AND one, AND two.”) This correlates to the subject, the instant when the dancer steps off stage at the end of the performance. The movement is still part of the dancer, he or she is still following the impulse, the line, it doesn’t end abruptly. The “end” of the piece does not apply to a dancing body the way it might to the scrolling ending credits of a film.
 
Sweat, tension -- from one portrait to another -- they feel different. Sweat is the most obvious sign that something physical has just happened, and there is often tension in a face, a hand. Some of the dancers seem dazed, drained. Others seem to be stepping out of the shower. After dancing Empty Moves by Angelin Preljocaj, Yurié Tsugawa was as tight as a drum. Elias Lazaridis, who is a dead ringer for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in Genesis (in which the choreographer himself did not perform, contrary to what some have written), seems to be part of another world or reality, his arms hanging.
 
After Les Oiseaux, Nacera Belaza seems to be a warrior woman, ready to face off against the world. These portraits are not about the pieces performed, unlike other photos which attempt to capture a movement or -- worse -- to freeze it, creating a pretty picture. Here it is what happening inside which is shown in such a large format. For Nacera Belaza, coming off stage “you feel a superior consciousness leaving the body little by little, as it returns to its ordinary speed.” Cédric Charon needs to reconstruct, to rebuild himself. “It is like I’ve been run through a shaker. I have to breathe, to reconnect.” He puts on a jacket, a second protective skin, as he feels too exposed, “as if everything could penetrate me.” Matthieu Hocquemiller, after a slight retreat where he revisits his mental film of the performance, needs physical contact, to hold someone in his arms. For Emanuel Gat, “the machine turns off, as if it is all erased. An autism takes over.” Korganow is not about pleasing the spectators, that was never his goal. But like the performance or the period beforehand -- this moment of exiting the stage is a special moment, something not ordinary. And the de rigueur applause has very little to do with what the audience is feeling.  

A piece of the secret.
 
In 2004, the Hispano-Belgian choreographer Olga de Soto created a performance‑news story about the famous piece Le Jeune Homme et la Mort by Roland Petit (1946). Audience members from back then, whom she was able to locate, remembered the piece well, they remembered it all, the movements, the steps, the situation. Others, after the performance, knew they were going to change their lives, getting divorced, for example.
 
The stage exit is critical for the protagonists. Dance, an art they call ephemeral, isn’t that at all. It is written in the dancers’ bodies, secretly. It is a part of the secret Grégoire Korganow reveals, with the help of the dancers. Which helps us understand our own bodies, and our consciousness, after a performance.”

 
Marie Christine Verney
Article in Libération and on www.libe.fr, July 9, 2014
Referencing the exhibition Sortie de scène at Montpellier danse, 2014