A group of dancers in varied poses and costumes perform on a shiny floor in an industrial space with brick walls, pillars, and minimal lighting.

Prep School: 10000 Gestures

French choreographer Boris Charmatz is widely celebrated for his radical approach to contemporary dance. Read more about Charmatz’s Museum of Dance/Musée de la danse.

10000 Gestures was named the best dance show of 2017 in The Guardian:

Boris Charmatz’s new work was neither the most technically accomplished I saw this year nor the most choreographically achieved. Sections of it were even a little dull. Yet the audacity of its concept, the theatricality of the venue and the acuity with which it captured our skittering, anxious zeitgeist, made 10000 Gestures a singular experience… 1000o Gestures may have started as a dance boffin’s conceit but at its surprisingly magisterial best, it became a meditation about life, loss, randomness and death.

RELATED EVENTS
A man in black briefs runs toward the camera on a shiny stage, arms outstretched, while several other dancers move in various poses in the background.
  • Thu Sep 27 – Fri Sep 28, 2018

Boris Charmatz: 10000 Gestures

  • Dance
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Hentyle Yapp on Boris Charmatz

What’s the difference between a gesture and a movement? And what does such a difference have to do with our sensibilities and the political? Put differently, although it is common to conceptualize something like a political movement (like Black Lives Matter, the Russian Revolution, Reproductive Rights, or the Zapatistas), it is harder to imagine a political gesture.

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A man with short curly hair and a beard, wearing a light-colored fleece hoodie, stands with arms crossed in front of a white brick wall.

GET INTO IT

Trailer for 10000 Gestures

Boris Charmatz’s Musee de la Dance

GET THEE TO THE LIBRARY: LET’S DANCE


Learn more about dance in a variety of readings that approach the form from a range of practical and theoretical perspectives.

Post Show Conversation

Boris Charmatz and Ana Janevski

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Interview with Boris Charmatz

“Dancers are not just works by an author. They are multiple and complex hybrids, who move to themselves the notion of the work’s delimitation, its demonstration, its duration, its identification.”

Dance Research Journal | December 2014(opens in a new tab)

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EXTRA CREDIT

10000 (Sonic) Gestures: A Response to Boris Charmatz