What would we see in your drawings?

There is a little invisible door in each drawing. A door that opens and lets you into a long hallway more or less lit. In the hallway there are more doors. One that opens onto the grotesque, another whose handle is sticky and slippery, one that is closed, one that is lightly painted, another with a wide open lock... and many more yet.

Each reader will unconsciously open the first door, step into the hallway and choose one of the entrances.

Words by Stéphane Blanquet, gathered by Eric Benveniste.

Emilio Calcagno and Olivier Dubois chose to work on Blanquet’s short movies, wherein the body is more specifically staged. The characters’ physical and psychological weaknesses give rise to a play between the drawings’ movements and those of the bodies. Irony is the main feature of En Sourdine, built by the choreographers as a triptych around three short movies – Les yeux, les bras, les oreilles (eyes, arms, ears) – taken from Mute Stories, a series of 26 episodes made for television, each lasting 1 minute.

‘Often hilarious, the “Mute Stories” short films draw up a staggering catalogue of human perversions, particularly representative of Blanquet’s recurrent visual and thematic obsessions (…). The 18th film is undoubtedly one to watch. It portrays parents in misery serving their own ears as a meal for their children, who are delighted to finally have something to chew on (…). One episode that particularly stands out in the series is the 13th, in which Blanquet stages himself, facing a miracle spring...’. Within this world, it is a matter of playing at getting lost and losing one’s balance, in order to grasp the dreams of an adult, without ever finding a way out…

Working on the Peter Pan character means diving into the world of childhood, with its fragility, its positivism and its dreams. It also implies questioning a realm that rejects the adult world and lives under the constant threat of reality.

Regis Loisel’s work on Peter Pan seemed convincing and realistic to us. It reveals what many other versions have so far concealed: the need to find a Peter Pan made of flesh, a far cry from that famous little green man we are used to seeing. A free child, but also a disturbed one. Nonetheless, the work remains an invitation to head back for an imaginary world, through a rebellion against the duty of becoming an adult.

The artist’s characters, storyline, scenery and colours inspired us to design a choreography for this story, to humanise the drawings by reproducing them in three dimensions. What would Peter Pan’s gestures be? What bodily form would he acquire in his comings and goings between dream and reality? How could dance explore the body of this drawn character, an adolescent in reluctant transformation?

Creating a bond between writing and movement, indelible and ephemeral, text and body; using the body to tell a story; staging it to tackle a mythical and popular character through the medium of dance; to a certain degree, it is about offering a key to recognise oneself in dance, proving that it can tell any story, throwing new light on comic works by creating a dance performance open to all audiences.