Celui qui tombe, Paris: grace under pressure from Yoann Bourgeois
A precarious platform is also a springboard for a penetrating study of resilience
Yoann Bourgeois could be forgiven for looking back on the decade just gone with a sense of satisfaction. The French choreographer’s explorations of balance — in which performers’ efforts to keep their footing on precarious structures acquire an existential charge — have drawn audiences around the world. In 2016, he became the first circus-trained artist to be appointed co-director (with Rachid Ouramdane) of a National Choreographic Centre, in Grenoble.
Knowing about this subsequent success, there is a special pleasure to be had in returning to one of Bourgeois’ earliest hits, 2014’s Celui qui tombe, currently presented at the Centquatre in Paris. It has become known in English as He Who Falls, but The One Who Falls would be a more appropriate translation, since its cast of three men and three women are equal partners.
When they appear on a large wooden platform that is slowly lowered by cables, they look like they’re sleeping. As the structure tilts, they slide around it, then attempt to stand and walk, like hikers on a treacherous slope. Once it is horizontal again, the platform starts spinning. After stumbling around, the group adapts, huddling and leaning forward or backwards at impossible-looking angles to compensate for the centrifugal force.
It sounds chaotic on paper, but in Celui qui tombe it isn’t. The pace is deliberate, and while Bourgeois’ performers generally have a background in circus, he strips their craft of its usual demonstrativeness. They take their time reacting and adjusting to the changes in their environment, and look for all the world like regular people as they do so.
And they all depend on each other, in a remarkably simple metaphor of community. When one performer decides to stride to a corner of the platform, the others are forced to scramble to create a counterweight, lest they all fall off. To Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”, individuals run to stay in place, fleetingly form couples, then are forced to jump over the others’ bodies as they each fall to the ground — a life cycle flashing before our eyes.
“It’s Survivor,” an audience member whispered behind me near the end. It is and it isn’t. Like the reality show, Celui qui tombe does subject its cast to hostile circumstances, but its story is one of quiet, undramatic resilience, and all the more penetrating for it.