Can seeing a dance performance change the course of a life? Can a dance festival move a town, shift a society?
Then
I cannot remember how I got to be sitting in the now defunct rock venue Salle Victoire in Montpellier in 1983, but what I will never forget is Dominique Bagouet’s performance F. et Stein, that was being presented there. The impact of seeing the slight, Buster Keatonesque figure hurl himself around a stage, alarmingly off balance, tragically fragile, but with power that made my 1980s hairdo stand on end unaided, was an instant artistic coup de foudre.
With the naive effrontery of a 19-year-old, a failed French GCSE and clutching my newly acquired press card, I went backstage and asked if I could interview the choreographer. I had no idea until then that Bagouet was also the director of the Montpellier Danse Festival but quickly learnt that Jean-Paul Montanari would be stepping in as general director that same year. F.et Stein marked Bagouet’s transition back to his singular self as a creator.
The man I met was softly spoken and kind beyond measure. After the interview, having confessed my dancing ambitions, Bagouet must have sensed that this anglaise was a little lost. He suggested I latch onto the company, do daily class with them and follow their creation process. My memory’s timeline is hazy, but I recall watching rehearsals of Le Saut de l’Ange, a seminal piece Bagouet made in collaboration with visual artist Christian Boltanski who transformed the Théâtre Cour Jacques Coeur (now the Agora) into a dreamlike château outlined with countless fairy lightbulbs. The performance was panned by both punters and the press. At the time I wrote enthusiastically that it represented the ‘quintessential value of the festival: the possibility for even an established artist to evolve, to manoeuvre, to take risks without fear of losing their livelihood’.
‘
Landing in Montpellier at the height of the festival felt like heaven
For me, having grown up in south London and attended a drab, chilly school, landing in Montpellier at the height of the festival, felt like heaven. Flocks of swooping swallows and the cri-cri of the cicadas were a permanent accompaniment to the open-air performances that, at ten at night, you could still watch in your sundress. And whereas Ballet Rambert was about as cutting-edge as dance companies came in London at the time, there seemed to be a contemporary dance revolution under way in France. Performances from Forsythe, Cunningham, Trisha Brown, lured the curious audiences into the theatres whilst newly formed local companies such as Michel Kelemenis & Cie or Cie Didier Theron, were filling the studios and streets with work that, as a classically trained dancer, seemed to me to miraculously combine being stylishly chic, deeply philosophical and intellectually articulate all at the same time. I learnt the language and lapped it all up, feeling none of the proverbial British cringe or anxiety about appearing pretentious.
A couple of years later, having landed my first professional dancing job, I found myself back in Montpellier and the Théâtre Jacques Coeur – this time on stage. I was living the dream.
Montpellier clearly represents a major flagstone in my life’s memory lane. Fathoming what makes a choreographic experience lodge in your mind and remain vivid for over four decades was the question I came to the festival with this year. Are our individual recollections the afterlife of this oft-called ephemeral artform? Like favourite pop songs, enduring memories are often laid down at an age when we are blank canvases eagerly waiting for something to leave its mark.
Now and then
The first performance our group of Springback writers saw this year was Twama Paradise by Héla Fattoumi. It’s a duet with Fattoumi and Sondos Belhassen – two women with curly grey manes, freely exploring, in a tender and playful way, the emotions related to Fattoumi’s Tunisian heritage. It was a touching and sincere piece but witnessing the ever-powerful Fattoumi, now approaching sixty, recalled the first duet she made together with Eric Lamoureux, Husaïs. I can still see them clearly standing far apart on either side of the stage, and one of them thrusting themselves horizontally through the air to land, wrapped around the other. The tension, the energy, the magnetic pull between them seemed, in that single leap, to embody the era. It was made in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the year following L’Année de la Danse when French dance was crowned as a major artform, the ascension to which Montpellier Danse Festival, with its dynamism and newly generous subsidies, greatly contributed.
It was also the moment that I was able to programme Fattoumi-Lamoureux in a new international series at The Place Theatre in London, directed by John Ashford, and thus began another, very exciting seven-year chapter that enabled me to return regularly to Montpellier, by then the dance mecca, wearing my new programmer’s hat.
In 1992, at the age of 41, heartbreakingly, Dominique Bagouet died of AIDS. His death was devastating for his family, friends and the whole dance community. Priscilla Danton, Bagouet’s adopted daughter, with whom I danced and am still friends, reveals that Bagouet didn’t have time to set out the terms of his choreographic legacy. Les Carnets Bagouet, an organisation set up by some of the company’s original dancers, has revived a few of his pieces but continues to feel its way in the dark. Memories of his works differ, and are so specific to everyone they touched.
Montanari was deeply affected by Bagouet’s death. Already fierce in his defence of the destigmatisation of the HIV/AIDS virus and a committed supporter of ACT UP, he markedly chose to programme the work of queer artists directly affected by the epidemic – Bill T. Jones, Thierry Smits, Alain Buffard and more. In 1987, he even programmed Rudolf Nureyev, already diagnosed with AIDS, in a choreography by Francine Lancelot. The star was painfully diminished, unable to summon up any of his past vigour, but proudly defiant nonetheless as he walked off stage to a torrent of excruciatingly cruel boos.
Now again
Montanari ran the festival until 2024, the year before he died aged 77. Today a fresh chapter has begun. Two structures have been merged into one. L’Agora unites the Choreographic Centre and the Festival under a team of four co-directors: Jann Gallois, Dominique Hervieu, Pierre Martinez and Hofesh Shechter. The future is an open stage but already the new leadership seems committed to the festival’s original byline: All kinds of dance for every kind of public.
Audiences are diverse and theatres are packed every night. Lasting memories are being made. For me this year, it was with the work of Armin Hokmi, one of the festival’s associate artists. Not through the off-kilter pogoing of F. et Stein, nor the airborne flights of Fattoumi-Lamoureux, but in the repetition of tiny shoulder shrugs and disassociated chin tilts across the nine performers. The pared-down vocabulary, to me, speaks of now. Perhaps it’s movement, however minimal, that affixes memories for the future.
The last piece I saw this year was Belgian based Olga de Soto’s Une introduction (revisitée). It’s a meticulously researched lecture performance that delves into the enduring memories of those who either saw or danced different versions of Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table. The ballet presaged the circumstances that led to the Second World War. Its echoes with the current political climate are chilling.
The festival continues to be both a bold beacon and a bridge for dance, the public and the wider world within which movement is created. And with several of Montpellier’s busy trams emblazoned with the festival logo, dance is still astonishingly central to the city’s everyday life.
But as well as all that, I hope that Montpellier continues to be our beautiful, shared memory palace to which we can return to recover the parts of ourselves that first came alive through dance. ●
Oonagh Duckworth’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
