Débandade

First showing 23, 24 & 25 November 2021

Le Lieu Unique, Centre for contemporary culture in Nantes

 

"I would like Débandade to be somewhere between musical comedy, vox pop, stand-up comedy and the ritual of exorcism".

 

In 2019, at the invitation of TAP in Poitiers, the CND in Paris and the CCN in Montpellier, I had the opportunity to work with several groups of students aged between eighteen and twenty-five. The piece Nous vaincrons les maléfices, which grew out of this work, looks back at the utopias of the 1970s through the eyes of today's youth, marked by the threat of ecological collapse. The starting point is Michael Wadleight's documentary Three Days of Peace and Music, about the legendary Woodstock gathering. Overlaid on the soundtrack, which acts as a dramaturgic thread, the students' words question those of their elders about the excesses of a capitalist society that they have largely helped to validate. This enlightening experience strengthened my curiosity about this generation that was born into this century and which questions it so well; it also laid the foundations for a process that I would like to continue here.

 

Why a piece about men?

All the more so if the aim is to question a system of gender assignment that is widely questioned today? As I met this panel of young dancers from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds and worked with them, I became aware of a fully incorporated fluidity of gender, a multiplicity and complexity of perspectives, incarnated in the bodies themselves, that I wanted to question.

I tried, very tentatively at first, to question them about how they experience their masculinity today. Specifically, as contemporary dancers sharing a common environment, despite being geographically and culturally distant. The response was immediate, revealing a genuine lack and a real need to articulate the challenges related to gender, which they all experience on different scales and from sometimes diametrically opposed perspectives.

 

In a word, in the context of the resurgence of a welcome but very offensive brand of feminism, I wanted to ask them how they were doing. Because no, I don't believe that the question is simple and simply resolved by politically correct positions, just like any that question the representations of power, knowing that it is always power itself, and the monsters it generates, that need to be questioned. Thus the idea of an all-male project was born. A man's production conceived by a woman, a transgenerational production, a production that would speak to the feminine from male points of view and feelings.

 

Olivia Grandville

 

Press coverage

« Débandade aborde les rapports de genres sous une forme plurielle d’une très stimulante tonicité, à la fois physique et spirituelle. » Jérôme Provençal, Les Inrocks.

Olivia Grandville était l’invitée de Marie Richeux dans son émission Par les temps qui courent sur France Culture.

"Quand danse et cirque parlent des masculinités, remonte-couilles compris", Belinda Mathieu, Télérama

"Débandade d'Olivia Grandville", Nicolas Villodre, Danser Canal Historique