L'écriture en mouvement de Laurent Mauvignier: Ce que j'appelle oubli

Inspired by a news item that occurred in 2009 in Lyon, Ce que j’appelle oubli comes in a single sentence of sixty pages (this is not a novelty, think of the long sentence of Mathias Énard in Zone), without beginning or end, raw, indignant and sometimes ironic, which comes back to the story of a young man beaten to death by four security guards in a supermarket reserve for drinking a can of beer without paying for it. This prose traces the existence of the victim, slips into his head, then into that of the brother. This multiplication of points of view slowly draws a portrait, which is not strictly speaking that of the deceased, but a collective portrait, ours, of a society which authorizes these crimes and then forgets them. This text was the subject of both a theatrical space by Denis Podalydès and a dance piece by Angelin Preljocaj, a choreographer who had already collaborated, in 1995, with the writer Pascal Quignard for L'Anoure. This was a writing "for" the stage, which is also an interesting part of the relationship between literature and dance. However, remarks are needed both on the very structure of a "commanded" text for a show and on the evolution that has been observed in this kind of link between literature and dance. For example, in the Quignard / Preljocaj collaboration, the voice of the text was a ballet character, L'Anoure, played by Preljocaj himself, dressed in white, which represented the voice of the text on stage. On the other hand, during the collaboration, for example, between the writer Marie Nimier and the choreographer Dominique Boivin for the gesture of Vous dansez?, a sequence of monologues about "everything that goes on in the head" of the dancers while that he was dancing, there was a reciprocal metabolism of writing on the part of the dance and vice versa, so that the voice-over did not tell, but embodied the thought and became "body", the thoughts of the dancers were taking shape. It was an incarnated word animated by the body of the dancer; the dancer's body gave life and body to the voice of the text. The word did not replace the gesture, it "made itself" gesture, "word incarnate". That said, returning to the duo Mauvignier-Preljocaj for what I call forgetting, not being an order, far from the analysis of the choreographic piece, this study will point the analysis of the writing of Mauvignier in this text which calls the movement of dance as a component of the text itself. "The body is in the writing of the text" emphasized the writer during an interview with «Libération» (25.09.12). Beyond the transposition of a text into a dance or the product of a joint operation (which is a recent success story in the context of the interactions between dance and literature), I would like to dwell on singular structure of this story as well as its silences, its "voids", this "question of the credit that can be brought to language", as the writer observed in an interview published in 2000 (S. Bikialo and J. Dürrenmatt (eds), Dialogues contemporains, «La Licorne», 2000). What are the characteristics of this "body-text"? What does the movement say that the word can not express? Would it be a way to give body and movement, through dance, art of the body, to the emotion of the text? It will be a question of enlightening the writing mechanisms proper to this prose which calls dance as a visual and gestural translation of the text, an additional score and not a secondary illustration in relation to the text, to say life and, sometimes, its brutality.