a stunning retrospective – L’Express

Moulins, its famous chiming tower, its vaulted Halls and… its National Center for Stage Costumes (CNCS). Since 2006, this former 18th century military barracks has housed a unique collection of 10,000 theatrical, lyrical and choreographic outfits, from the mid-19th century to the present day. With, in the role of guardian of the temple, the incomprehensible Delphine Pinasa, who has no equal in enlivening these precious textiles with juicy anecdotes. What else can we do but open our eyes and ears wide to this incredible set of pieces from the BnF, the Paris Opera and the Comédie-Française, but also the multiple donations from companies?

The visit, however, has only just begun. A stone’s throw from the reserves, a stopover is necessary in the reconstructed apartment of Rudolf Nureyev, before discovering the most fantastic parades that the CNCS is hosting, until January 5, in these walls formerly devoted to uniforms: a stunning retrospective stage costumes which dressed – or undressed – the creations of Philippe Decouflé. Forty years of the choreographer’s career are thus deployed across 13 sections and as many “planets”.

From the opening of the course, the tone is set in the main room with, erected on a circular podium, this revisited tutu: a strapless skirt dress in Plastazine foam evoking a lace pattern, worn by the dancer Alexandra Naudet in Shazam! in 1998, alongside the late Christophe Salengro. A stone’s throw away, the unfashionable majorettes of Panorama (2012) and the tumbling outfit in superimposed discs, the first evocation of the Albertville Olympics. It’s only a beginning. At the end of the exhibition, an entire room is dedicated to the memorable opening ceremony of the 1992 Winter Games which revolutionized the genre. Under a cloud of snowflakes, suspended in the air, around thirty emblematic costumes created by Philippe Guillotel are exhibited – bird men, snowball women, stilt walkers, elastic dancers or skaters with decomposed gestures -, while a video broadcasts extracts from the high mass followed at the time by 2 billion viewers.

Even if, in the career of Philippe Decouflé, there was a before and after Albertville, this famous winter having propelled the choreographer to the forefront of world contemporary dance, the CNCS retrospective demonstrates that his inspiration has never wavered. The stroll sees the planets come to life, staged using mirrors and optical effects by the window magician Marco Mencacci and the lighting designer Valérie Bodet. We find, more alive than ever, the fern bodies and the microbes on the webbed feet of Codexthe first real public success of Decouflé and his company DCA in 1986, inspired by the far-fetched Codex Seraphinianus (1970) by the jack-of-all-trades architect Luigi Serafini, which the choreographer would later adapt into Decodex And Tricodex. Friend Guillotel was already at the helm of the brilliant Codexas, the following year, he was the artist-craftsman of the violin armholes of the fantaisiste Tutti.

Here, the decades span and intertwine throughout the crazy creations of these artist-artisans who accompanied Philippe Decouflé’s quest for beauty and meaning. This is evidenced by the polka dot prints and pop wigs of WieBo (2015), a tribute to the chameleon Bowie, combining the talents of costume designer Laurence Chalou and “hairdresser” Charlie Le Mindu. Five years earlier, the latter had designed the unforgettable natural hair cape forOctopus. Without forgetting the Hermès silk squares transformed into kimonos for the New Short Pieces (2017), cut by Jean Malo, another long-term textile accomplice of DCA, to whom we also owe, among many other clothing innovations, the jackets and coats made of folded-unfolded paper by Sombrero (2006).

At Decouflé, who as a child dreamed of being a comic book artist, the pencil is always within reach. Extracts from an old trunk at the Chaufferie, his place of rehearsal and creation in Seine-Saint-Denis, his work notebooks join the windows. Extraordinary clowns, levitating silhouettes, smoke hats or Siamese dancers, it’s a whole universe of sketches in the making pushing the limits of movement. “Tex Avery inspired me a lot in the search for gestures that are a priori impossible to achieve… I always have something of this desire left, an oddity in the movement, something extreme or delirious… I am looking for a dance of imbalance , on the verge of falling, With models like the Marx Brothers for example, and in particular Groucho Marx, I cultivated mischievous risk-taking, the comical repetition of error,” confides the tall 62-year-old. . If dance has become his “vocabulary”, all the performing arts interest those who, in addition to cartoonsgrew up with musicals, the glittery nightclubs of the 1980s, video, to which Merce Cunningham introduced him, and… the discovery of Triadic Balletthe experimental opus of Bauhaus choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, created in 1922.

All that remained was to orchestrate costumes, notes and drawings in a stroll in the image of the Decouflesque dreams that have spanned forty years of live shows. It was Philippe Noisette, a journalist and author who is an expert on contemporary dance, who had the idea of ​​exhuming the crazy wardrobe of a Decouflé that he has been following since Codex – then discovered by the curator as “Alice marveling at her garden” – and to stimulate at the CNCS an unprecedented meeting of “these “treasures of inventiveness”. Philippe Decouflé. The fabric of danceinitially thought of as the title of the exhibition, Noisette finally preferred Decouflé Planet(s)a title which “reminds us that the stars are not that far away, you just have to look up to admire them. And to dream. A bit like Alice”.