Andy De Groat, inspirations et libertés at CN D

A noble and wild character, “both funny and ferocious’’, according to some, a brilliant and confusing choreographer, demanding and even capricious, for others, or ‘‘a knight with a never-weary concern’’ : Andy De Groat (1947-2019), the man as well as the artist, is difficult to grasp in a single formula. Not because he is a being of synthesis, on the contrary, but because – from whatever side one wants to look at him -, a feature, a facet, a piece, a memory left behind immediately contradicts the idea one had of him, the color one attributed to him, the quality one found the most accurate to define him.

Andy De Groat knew how to be, was, contradictorily, several beings at once : fascinated by the classical repertoire and also tasting the baroque imagination or certain modern radicalities ; alternately minimalist and flamboyant ; almost lyrical, here, and there, displaying all abstraction ; seized in such a work by the combinatorial constraint when, elsewhere, he was seized by the imperatives of a narrative or the features of various characters.
In the creator, director of bodies but also of ‘‘ideas’’, in the Mallarméan way, textual sources and iconographic sources have concurred, the ideal of a sophisticated, irreducible poetics, and the taste of a generous and light-hearted fantasy, the research of the form and the temptation of the comment. Of the man, one could know the passion or the indifference, the tenderness or the anger, the humility of the wise child and the moods of the spoiled child, the melancholy and the sarcasm.

In his work, as in his life journey, however, several salient features and characteristics speak more clearly than others of who this major artist was – an atypical figure in the dance landscape of his time – and of the quality and originality of his work. This is what this exhibition, based on the archives the choreographer donated to the CN D, wishes to show the public. Between New York and Montauban, from the Andy De Groat dancers to the youth company Wah Loo Tin Tin co, via Red notes and the Groupe de recherches de l’Opéra de Paris, from friends Robert Wilson and Jerome Robbins to dancers still cultivating his heritage, from the purity of “spinning” to the multiple iterations of Fan dance, from the excesses of La Bayadère to those of La Folie d’Igitur, the exhibition speaks of his dual Franco-American roots and a form of nomadism, his consideration for performers and the loyalty of his friends, the importance music had for him and his collage or reworking processes, his recourse to counting and various writing or drawing practices, his openness to children and amateurs and his complex relations with the professional world, but also the coexistence in the same life of fame and isolation, prestige and economic difficulty.