Spinning Creativity into Chaos
Boris Charmatz’s “10,000 Gestures”
By Adrienne Matei
The trope of the mad artist — a subject whose genius elides into her instability — is rooted in our tacit recognition that creativity is not so far removed from chaos. Artists are conventionally romanticized as society’s freest members — and yet the most naturally “troubled.” Does pain weigh more heavily on their sensitive souls; will they exhaust themselves in the pursuit of being understood? 10,000 Gestures, by the radical French choreographer Boris Charmatz, addresses anxieties about art, and those who create it, combining imagination and intensity to make disturbing entertainment. The program notes explain the piece as a cavalcade of dance moves arranged with a light hand: “Each gesture is unique, not repeated, and evaporates as soon as it is completed.” This dance is a celebration of human ingenuity and an exploration of unbridled imaginative freedom, and the darkness therein.
The performance begins with a woman in red rushing the stage. A force of energy, she cavorts and twirls. There is something playful about her lack of rhythm or routine. Hyperactive and gleeful, she moves like a music box dancer free from the rote mechanism that once held her captive. Seemingly excited by the variety of things her body can do, she lifts her leg and strums it like a guitar. She hops like a bunny, tumbles to the floor, then picks herself up and picks out her wedgie. The audience laughs. This is going to be fun.
Seventeen more dancers join her, carnivalesque in sparkly leotards, bedazzled jeggings, and thongs. They participate in what seems to be game on the continuum of “Pretend the carpet is lava,” but more like “Lava shall befall whoever makes the same move twice.” And so, everyone is doing something different, counting aloud, trying to get to 10,000 moves. Dancers punch the air, take running dives and slide across the floor. Some leap, clapping their hands between their legs mid-soar; others scoot around on their elbows and bottoms, wiggle, or flex. New ideas gush, unstaunched. How much can they come up with? How long can they go on before bleeding dry? It begins to seem like every choice they make is grimmer, more aggressive than the last, that they increasingly suffer under Charmartz’s unseen hand. The choreographer’s skill reads like the performers’ own hive mind, grouping them at moments around the stage in protective huddles or shooting them off in explorations of individuality, allowing them space to pant and collapse in exhaustion. Mozart’s crescendoing Requiem in D minor underscores the dance — a piece the composer is thought to have been writing for his own funeral. He died before it was complete. The music’s beauty is at odds with the flailing mob — precise where they are random — but they match it in momentum and intensity, especially as someone turns the volume up loud.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment 10,000 Gestures starts making me nervous — when it begins to feel less like watching the free than like watching the cursed, dancers trapped like Hans Christian Andersen’s doomed, red-shoed girl. Somebody screams, anguish piercing Mozart’s Requiem. Suddenly, everyone is screaming.
They say, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” But what about doing a different thing, and a different thing, and a different thing? A man puts his foot into his mouth, then exposes his testicle. Frenzied, the performers swim into the audience. The dancers crawl over laps and climb up the balconies, and one grabs the hand of an audience member, rubbing it over her body, wet with sweat. Another snatches someone’s hairclip and rakes it over my scalp. We, the audience, watch as one of our own is lifted and carried like a touchdown-winner by the mob that has transgressed our privacy, voided our neutrality uncondoned. We are so distracted by this siege on our seats, it’s easy to miss the soloist who remains on stage, silhouetted against an unbearable backlight, manifesting the performance’s moment of elegance, all but eclipsed by pandemonium. The experiment’s achievement is not the arbitrary goal of 10,000 gestures, rather, the evocation of mad artistry — a shared sense among the crowd that we know, now, what it is to see everything and nothing, for effort to vanish into the void.
To watch 10,000 Gestures is to experience how an abundance of impermanence disorients reality, and to watch anxiety take form as a corrupted version of the liberty you admired. It’s to feel the ultimate overload before departing, gratefully, back into the comfort of rhythms and routines.
