When all is said and done, Jean-Claude Gallotta has had only one bona fide mentor : the cinema. It is this medium that has enabled him to approach dance, music and literature more intimately. Everything he has learned – about life and its dynamic forces ; about people and what moves them ;
about the body and what directs it ; about thought and what conveys it ; about beauty and all that it heals – everything, in his telling, comes from the cinema. There are obvious affinities between dance and cinema. Both are arts of movement – indeed, movement is their very principle. Also, their rhythmic
continuum is achieved through montage. And last but not least, both unfold in the frame of time. Dear Cinéma is the story of Gallotta-the choreographer’s crucial encounters with filmmakers, with their works of course, but also the bond he has established with them – on occasion fleeting, but always fertile – including projects dreamed of and those actually realized, drawing on a shared desire « to create something together ». The exchanges they have shared together – sometimes the mere words – continue to inspire him even today. With these artists and their works, Jean-Claude feels he treasures more memories than if he were a thousand years old. It is, no doubt, with this material in mind that Gallotta creates his choreographies. From the close interplay between dance and film, the two arts achieve in his hands new synergies which emerge uninhibited from a creative process that involves refining and interweaving.When cinema penetrates the choreographer’s dance, it does so in different ways : with the filmed portraits of 99 choreographed duos ; with tributes to Vittorio de Sica in his Trois Générations and to David Lean in his Chroniques chorégraphiques, in which film images themselves become choreographic sequences. Also in his Rei Dom and his l’Amour en deux, the choreographer himself becomes a moviemaker. And, finally, in his Carnets de voyage, the choreographer is the cameraman. Thus, in turn, Jean-Claude Gallotta’s dance infiltrates the cinema. Some filmmakers, such as Claude Mouriéras (Un chant presqu’éteint and Montalvo et l’enfant) or Raul Ruiz (Mammame), succeed in creating « artistic gem after gem ». Others absorb a bit of Gallottian spirit in their films through various references and associations : for example, Anne-Marie Mieville in Lou n’a dit non, Jean-Luc Godard in Nouvelle Vague, Bertrand Blier in les Côtelettes..., and more recently Nadège Trébal in Douze mille.
With a view to forging a link between the cinema and live performance on stage, Jean-Claude Gallotta has entrusted students from the Lyon-based École nationale supérieure de cinéma, aka the CinéFabrique under the direction of Claude Mouriéras, with the creative task of providing each
dance sequence with a visual prologue in the form of a very short film. Somewhat like an ancient fresco that evaporates in contact with air, think Fellini’s Roma, each filmed sequence will give way to choreographic movement on stage, prolonging the filmed sequence, while simultaneously deepening and expanding it. In return, once the filmed image has brought the choreographed sequence to the fore, dance will bring to life its defining feature : the here and now.
C.-H.B.