This “conversation” in which several dancers as well as the lighting designer Françoise Michel also participate, is focused on the revival in 2003 of Projet de la matière (1993).

Through to-and-fro movements between sequences of the piece, rehearsal times or work in workshops, the film apprehends the uniqueness of this production in Odile Duboc’s career, while offering an immersion into her universe. Projet de la matière was “an opportunity to give body to intuitions that I had had for a long time”, revealed the choreographer.

The creation of this “work of states” was preceded by a long period of experimentation, with no other direction than the desire to bring out the “liquidity” of the body, its organicity and its materiality. Odile Duboc first made the dancers work with “tactile objects”, designed by the visual artist Marie-José Pillet – an air cushion, a water mattress, metal slabs. She then asked them to remember the sensations they felt, but while playing with gravity, independently from the objects first used. In other words, based on masses and volumes, effects of contact, resistance, friction or even imaginary impulsions. There was such richness in the movements and “body poses” revealed by this process that they became the exclusive material of this Projet (Project) that Duboc views as “my dance written by the dancers”.

A classical  dancer and self-taught teacher in Aix-en-Provence, Odile Duboc created her own school Les Ateliers de la danse in the 1970s. In 1983, she created  the association Contre jour, with her partner and lighting designer, Françoise Michel. In  1990 and until the end of 2008, she directed the Franche-Comté National Choreographic Center in Belfort, where she succeeded Joanne Leighton. In 1993, she created the work Projet de la matière, a milestone in the history of the new French dance. She  will be recognized as an important choreographer of French dance, and  will stage many shows and operas for various institutions, including the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers. She died of cancer on April 23, 2010 at the age of 69.