Boris Charmatz’s collaboration with the association Edna does not stop at dancing and choreographing explosive works. He also reflects on what his art brings to audiences, what it demands of the performers, and on its history.
Carrying out reflection involves putting it into action, and more specifically confronting one’s own practice with many others. This is above all a question of breaking down the boundaries of fixed categories and their accepted hierarchy: pedagogy in one corner, improvisation in another, experimentation set apart from the discourse used to justify it, and crowning it all, creation.
Education is thus an assemblage of pieces, texts, sound poetry, and improvised motifs, gleaned here and there, which borrow their artistic form from modes of “Discourse.” Here teaching resides as much in the dissemination of ideas as in the art of their representation. This is an unusual seminar which derives its unity not from a theme but from a way of doing. A mini-model for an open university.
Booklet Mettre en scène, TNB 2000

List of “by proxy”, “quoted”, “discreet archivists”:
Presents: Boris Charmatz, Sébastien Clément, Julia Cima, Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Théo Kooijman, Mathilde Lapostelle, Barbara Manzetti, Annabelle Pulcini
By proxy:
Gilles Deleuze – L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, directed by Pierre-André Boutang – Editions Montparnasse
Pierre Vidal-Naquet – Les trois grands type de professeurs – Extract from La pensée grecque – interview with Jean-Pierre Vernant ; Video from the collection Savoir et mémoire by l’Association pour la Recherche à l’EHESS.
Alain Michard – extract from Virvoucher Dieppe performed by Théo Kooijman from the texts of Edward T.Hall (La Dimension cachée), Desmond Morris (La clé des gestes), Alain Michard and Théo Kooijman
Bernard Heidsieck – Extract of the sound poetry Démocratie II (Passe-partout n°27)
André Malraux – Hommage à Jean Moulin, extract of the discours on December 19, 1964 at the Panthéon
René Lussier – La visite de Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle revisité. Extracts of the radio creation Le trésor de la langue. AM 015 CD
Père Georges Finet – Extracts of Comment parler à nos enfants. Vinyl ES 7 GF 1.
Quoted:
Robert Filliou – Extract of Enseigner et apprendre. Archives Lebeer Hossmann Paris-Bruxelles
Rudol Laban – Extract of La maîtrise du mouvement, Editions Actes Sud
Georges Aperghis – Ces muscles.
Jean-François Pirson – Extracts of Le corps et la chaise – une méditation anthropologique dans l’atelier, éditions Métaphores.
Discreet archivists: Dimitri Chambras, Jean-Baptiste Favory, Madjid Hakimi, César Vayssié.