Boris Charmatz on the Musée de la Danse

‘“Museum” is indeed a loaded word, but it seems I like this kind of word. When I did the Bocal project [a nomadic school in the period 2002-2004 – ed.] all my friends suggested I could better call it a “laboratory”, “experimental research group”, or even a “one year workshop”. But what I really wanted was to explore the institution of the school itself, not a by-product. Of course, it was a school that was on fire, the walls were all movable. But it was a school, and naming it a school made it a real one. Don’t you think that we, as artists and curators with wild wings, should not let these loaded terms that describe our institutions simply function by themselves, while we criticize them? If you don’t care about politics, politics takes care of you, right? It’s the same with museums, schools, cultural policies: If we don’t put our hands on them, they will simply go on, without real artistic daring.

And another thing about the word “museum”: one might first think about art’s use of the term, but there are also museums for natural history, for wooden clogs or, even if rarely, museums about decolonization. In art, the term is indeed deeply loaded, but I am a dancer, educated as such, oriented since I was very young in this way of perceiving and thinking. Therefore a museum, in the strange word combination of the “Musée de la Danse”, is not so loaded at all for me. Isn’t it rather an absent ghost that almost never has shown up in the history of dance? Of course, there are some museums in the world called “danse museet” or “museo de la danza”, but none of them are busy with the kind of identification and validation of practices that is being done in the field of the visual arts.

With the Musée de la Danse, we do not directly address the issue of the museum of modern art per se (though I am also intrigued by the moment in history when the possibility of a museum for contemporary art was invented), because we want to embrace the Greek definition of the term (“a space to welcome the muses”) as well as the exotic possibility of realizing an explorative, mental building site of what a Musée de la Danse could be and could provoke.

I am a dancer, (or I pretend to be, and that’s enough). This is why, while trying to define a new type of public space for dance in the wider sense, I was impressed by the limitations of institutionalized spaces for dance, which are mainly theatres and schools. Pushing another door open was an opportunity to explore a black hole in the history of dance, not an attempt to place dance within a rich and powerful museum tradition.

Some people will laugh at the idea of a museum of dance, since it seems somewhere between a joke and a desire for recognition, for joining the establishment, or even for money (in France, art centres are poor in comparison with museums). The truth is that a museum would be the most interesting place to experiment, observe, reflect on dance, even to practice dance. A place that offered space, but more than anything offered the availability of time to viewers, researchers and artists – to have time to experiment with an enlarged vision of what dance could be, to escape the time of theatres and schools. We still need to invent this time-space. It is a kind of luxury to have a museum-in-progress! A fragile one, to be sure. We feel a direct kinship to museums such as that in the Lebanese city of Khiam, a former detention camp that was turned into a museum of the occupation and torture, and was later destroyed by the Israeli army during the last war. Most museums grow bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, but a museum of dance has fragility in its genes.

Finally, we are also inspired by the various museums founded by artists: Marcel Broodthaers’s Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, Kurt Schwitters’ museum in his apartment, the Merzbau, or Thomas Hirschhorn’s Musée Précaire Albinet, or the one you mentioned to me last time, Mathías Goeritz's Museo Experimental El Eco, in Mexico. There are many more of these interesting gestures by artists who do not stay mute in front of the big walls of the institutions. Such great projects are making our first mental step possible.’

‘As long as we are inventing this museum, asking curators, writers, architects, all sorts of theorists, archivists, historians, actors, dancers, choreographers, visual artists, about what this museum could be made of, the question of history remains. That’s what makes it interesting to us. Our museum of dance isn’t built on a taxonomy of what dance is or isn’t, nor it is built on what history is or isn’t. The question of how to relate to history in the field of dance is very broad and intriguing: how to consider history, not as a way of closing our present, but as a tool for opening up what the present and the future could look like.’

‘I grew up in the eighties in France. When I was still a kid, I used to watch a lot of dance pieces that had a strong desire for a “blank slate”, for starting a new movement for the new choreographies. I do not believe in the principle of the blank slate, neither in the field of dance nor in economics (seeing as some hardcore extremist neoconservative economists always dream of dismantling the social sphere to impose a blank slate again, of beginning a new democracy dedicated to the free market economy…). As an interpreter, a dancer for other choreographers, I was always fascinated by the “bastardising” of the body, where one can’t really distinguish what belongs to who, what is old and new in the body, where history starts, and why history is so much “present” in improvisation: you can’t make a step without being trapped in your own schemes of movement. Any gesture is invaded by the “other”, and this has never sufficiently been investigated at a micro and macro level: as a great potential, and not only as a limitation for movement. Improvisation is often seen as a way of escaping history, but I consider improvisation one of the best ways of considering history. There are supposed walls between patrimonia and research, history and contemporary art, invention and past, improvisation and written steps: but these mental walls are there to be displaced.’

‘I mentioned somewhat too quickly that I am still defining myself as a dancer. A lot of my friends are simply artists, or choreographers or curators, but I prefer this term of dancer, since it is still a blurred social position that allows me to think more freely. I just met two dancers, Alexandre Paulikevitch and Yalda Younes, who organized the first “laïc pride” [parade for the promotion of secularization – ed.] in Lebanon, and I admire this movement that could connect the dance studio with the street and political movements. Being a dancer lets me push open any symbolic door. But nowadays, visual art theory is so much larger than that of the dance world that it really makes sense to sometimes jump to the visual art scene. And, what with so many exhibitions trying to organize a “danse/arts plastiques” relation, it would seem that the “dancer” is a nice object with which to rethink object-hood in art history. The main difference between the two fields is money, of which there is very little in the world of dance. But more than anything else, it's about how it is used that makes it so different from the art world. If I haven’t yet written that it’s about time to consider minority practices in art, such as dance, as big potentials, it is because minorities should always be considered in any part of society: the keys are often in the hands of the “other”, right?’