Neither co-productions in the true sense, nor creative residencies, the Summer Quarters at the CNDC in Angers allowed around ten companies a year – during the late 1980s – to use the studios and accommodation while the students of the dance school were on holiday. Companies proliferated, encouraged by the contemporary dance development policy orchestrated by the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang.
Hervé Robbe was in Angers in 1988 to prepare the work Ignude Ignudi, which was produced in 1989 at the Théâtre de la Bastille. It was inspired by frescos by Michelangelo. The extract presented here shows a rehearsal, a precious moment that captures how the choreographer transmits gestures and steps via a sort of kinaesthetic contamination, based mainly on the performers “listening” with their bodies. This is the opposite of transmission by demonstration which is then reproduced.    
This strategy resonates with the particular and exceptionally musical quality of his writing. This sets the flow of movement according to a very subtle circulation of currents, the masses displaced in an unfurling spiral through the whole vertical of the body, favouring a counterbalancing openness of the upper body.  

Gérard Mayen

Credits

enregistré en 1988 dans les studios Bodinier du CNDC

chorégraphie Hervé Robbe

interprétation Jacopo Godani, Myriam Lebreton, Hervé Robbe, Nathalie Sembinelli, Gilles Welinsky

composition musicale T. Toeplitz Kasper

production CNDC Angers

Born in Lille in 1961. After studying architecture for a few years, Hervé Robbe set his sights on dance. He was principally trained at Mudra, Maurice Béjart's school in Brussels. He began his performing career dancing the neo-classical repertoire, then went on to work with various modern dance makers.

In 1987 he founded his company: le Marietta secret.

The course of his career is clearly founded on a constant renewal of his choreographic writing. Supported by loyal artistic collaborators, his work has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, associating the dance presence with visual, sound and technological worlds. His projects, polysemic works, take many forms: frontal performance, ambulatory shows and installations.

The place of the audience, its presence and view is decisive; the stage space is regularly called into question.

His arrival at the CCN (National choreographic Centre) of Le Havre Haute-Normandie offered more opportunities for his research.

In 1999 he composed his autobiographical solo Polaroïd. Within it, video images of places associated with his childhood appear and coexist with an uninterrupted physical display.

In 2000 he explored the theme of home with Permis de construire – Avis de Démolition, a diptych consisting of an installation and a performance. He went on to tackle the theme of the garden in 2002 with Des Horizons Perdus.

In a world constructed with screens – virtual containers for the body, evokers of death – in the duet REW he engaged in a dialogue between man and woman on the theme of suicide. In 2004, with the group piece Mutating Score, he returned to the idea of the performance area being a common space occupied by both audience and dancers. This installation-dance, while reaffirming this conviction about the force of movement, marks the culmination of a project on the use of new technologies, which are integrated into the show in real time.

In 2006 he designed the installation So long as baby...love and songs will be, a kind of manifesto of the preoccupations which underlie his work. The device is a containing structure in which the audience is invited to watch and listen to the dancer-singers present on screen. Hervé Robbe distanced himself from the stage with this, then returned to it in the works Là, on y danse in 2007 and Next days in 2010.

While maintaining his personal approach in his own productions, he regularly accepts commissions from the Opéra de Lyon, the Gulbenkian Ballet, the CNSMDP (Paris Conservatoire) and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Source: Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre Haute-Normandie