histoire(s) • Olga de Soto

What remains of a performance once the final applause has died away? On 25 June 1946, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the premiere of the ballet Le Jeune homme et la mort, conceived by Jean Cocteau and choreographed by Roland Petit, took place. Sixty years later, Olga de Soto chooses, not to reconstruct the work, but to collect its echoes. True to her penchant for work, the choreographer conducts a sensitive investigation based on unexpected material: the memories of the audience members present that evening. Their accounts, inevitably fragmentary and sometimes contradictory, form a touching reconstruction. Was dancer Nathalie Philippart wearing a red or black cape? Were the virtuoso Jean Babilée’s leaps dazzling or suspended? Accuracy hardly matters. It is the variations that make these accounts a means of transmission, between dance and documentary performance, where collective memory becomes a living work. histoire(s) reveals what transcends time and endures in the hearts of those who witnessed it. Twenty-two years after its premiere at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2004, the documentary choreographic video performance histoire(s) has become a veritable repository of memory and a landmark in ‘documentary dance’. Revived in 2026, it superimposes three eras: 1946, 2004, and 2026. The stage becomes the site of a mise en abyme, where we watch people today remembering yesterday’s aesthetic shock. Dance lives on beyond bodies that dance it, across the ages. Each new gaze reshapes the work. At a time when images vanish as far as they scroll, histoire(s) defends an ecology of time and brings to the fore the depth of an artistic memory stretching back eight decades. Copresentation Charleroi danse