Dance Lecture: Recycling

Can dance be recycled? What happens to movement over time? How do we appropriate gestures to transform them? What is the difference between recycling, revisiting, borrowing, spoiling, stealing, and plagiarizing? Contemporary art has long seized this question—from Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades to the Italian Arte Povera of the 1960s. Strangely, in dance, it has long remained a blind spot. Is it because dance is written on emptiness and eludes us?

The idea for this dance lecture was born during the lockdown. I had conceived my solo Swan Lake in my room using excerpts from Swan Lake viewed on YouTube. In parallel, I had launched a series of spontaneous mini-lectures on Instagram, one of which was dedicated to recycling.

From there, the idea of ​​transposing this lecture to the stage emerged, replaying and reinterpreting the video excerpts that served to illustrate it: a light form that would adapt to spaces as diverse as a university, a school, or a theater.

Starting from concrete cases –Beyoncé accused of plagiarizing Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, gestures from The Rite of Spring inserted by Boris Charmatz into Levée des conflits, Latifa Laâbissi taking up Mary Wigman's Witch Dance and extending it from a few minutes to over half an hour– this lecture takes us on a journey through the history of dance from an original and iconoclastic perspective. With a focus on these questions: are we coming too late to a world where everything has already been danced? Are we creating gestures ex nihilo, or are we taking them from a collective memory of dance?

Distribution / Team

• Olga Dukhovna: choreographer & performer
• Simon Hatab: dramaturge
• Amélie-Anne Chapelain: production manager
• Enora Floc’h: production coordinator

Premiere

• 2025 — Work in progress

Partners

• Production C.A.M.P