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The Choreography as a Field of Visions ON THE EVE OF IMAGES The images have not yet taken form. This is a time before the image, in the rudimentary casing of the rehearsal studio, surely a former warehouse, topped by a glass roof partially obscured to hold back the light. The crew of Wim Vandekeybus has a bit more than a month before docking at a theatre stage for the première of 7 for a Secret never to be told. They are nine (seven plus two) to traverse the secret of the image to steer it carefully into port. They stop for a moment to take aboard a passenger and to welcome his observation. A time of presentation. Each body is inflected by a name, to which, incidently, corresponds a geographical origin: Lorenza, Nordine, Isabelle, Carlos, Céline, Rasmus, Orlando, Lieve, John. Choreography is not an art of the puzzle. Assembling that which is scattered (names, bodies, energies, intentions), not in order to form a monolithic block, but to arrange the variations, make them coexist in a space where each fragment holds, in shared secret, the breath of the images. The ambivalence of the image. The choreographies of Wim Vandekeybus are not albums where one just turns the pages. Each of his performances maintains a certain flame burning under the image. His attraction to the cinema (film project in gestation, projections during the choreography, videos created from certain works) could be put in relation with the presence of fire in his performance (7 for a Secret never to be told will not fail in this use, with a startling man-bird sequence with wings of fire). It's that for Vandekeybus the image produced by the dance is not a deposit, but a fire which spreads. The bodies in movement are the phosphorus, the incandescence of a field of visions. PLAYING AROUND A PLOT „One for Sorrow / Two for Joy / Three for a Girl / Four for a Boy / Five for Silver/ Six for Cold / Seven for a Secret never to be told”. This Irish rhyme is a vade-mecum for those who might have a superstitious weakness when encountering magpies. The magpie didn’t ask anything of anybody, but the human spirit is so disposed that it likes to entrust

nature with signs by which destiny could manifest its omens. Wim Vandekeybus is not Jean de la Fontaine, and his vocation is not as a moralist. A dance performance cannot be read or recited like a fable, but the 'character' of the magpie and the virtues given to it by popular belief are nevertheless the hooks of a plot. As one strikes a match to create a spark, Wim Vandekeybus intends to strike bodies against the virtualities of the fantastic. A means, perhaps, to enflame the imagination. And one learns, during a detour in the conversation, that the choreographer already has in mind a project entitled, for the time being, Reinvented Fairytales. „People try to give a sense to the impossible, to the complexity of their emotions and of their fears, by giving an intention to things which remain indifferent,” explains the choreographer. „One has always used animals to give a shape to dream and fantasies; they don't speak and they keep a sort of secret. I do not claim make a show about superstition, but I like the idea of accepting to believe in something mysterious, to be able to interpret signs which don't have value as symbols.” Wim Vandekeybus prefers the simplicity and meandering of tales over the grandiloquence of mythologies. There were mythology sets up a supernatural truth, tales penetrate the uncertainties of existence. The storyteller is a dealer in narratives and images. He makes life a work of fiction where lies become true. Storytellers are an endangered species. Wim Vandekeybus met one of them in Hamburg: Carlo Verano, adventurer with a big heart whose personage gave rise to two performances, Immer das Selbe gelogen and Alle großen decken sich zu, as well as a film, La Mentira. Now deceased, it seems that old Carlo had bequeathed to Vandekeybus enlightened vision which allows the traversing of appearances, to explore the invisible ofthat which is seen. Carlo was a strange bird; the magpie which hops in 7 for a Secret never to be told is perhaps one of his facetious doubles seeing as the dancer with the magpie mask has the grace to be named Carlos. BEHIND REALITY This register of the fantastic, to which Vandekeybus has accustomed us in his last shows, seems to break with his first choreographies, What the Body Does Not Remember, Les porteuses de mauvaises nouvelles and The Weight of a Hand, which made play the springs of a physicality confronted with