Since the January 2015 attack, choreographer and dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier films herself and dances for one minute a day. A performance visible on the internet where you can discover a new video every day.
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“I’ve been dancing one minute a day for ten years”: since the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the choreographer and dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier launched a “act of poetic resistance”, become a long-term work, open and “witness of our times“. This performance has been visible since its beginnings on the site www.uneminutededanseparjour.com and on social networks where you can discover a new video every day: 3,643 have been posted.
Excerpts from this work will be presented Tuesday during an evening of tribute to the editorial staff of the decimated weekly, at Chaillot-Théâtre national de la danse in Paris: solo by its initiator, choreographic performances with around ten dancers, installations video, dance readings, music, etc.
“On January 7, 2015, after the stupor of the shock, I asked myself what I could do to make life”tells Nadia Vadori-Gauthier to AFP. The Franco-Canadian, now in her fifties, was an associated artist at the University of Paris 8 and had just completed a thesis in research-creation in the field of dance focusing on the relationships between art and life.
After dancing the day after the tragedy at four o'clock at Place de la Concorde in Paris to “show solidarity”, the idea came to him to “dance to make the day worth it”, inspired by a “quote from the philosopher Nietzsche who says 'And that we consider lost every day when we have not danced at least once.'
A few days later, in front of a small camera on a stand, here is the “minute” launched, with the inspiration of the moment – here soft and ample gestures, there footwork, without or with music. Street, bakery, shop, laundromat, fountain, RER, forest, Nadia Vadori-Gauthier places her work, the first weeks, “in the interstice of everyday life”.
With the attacks of November 13, 2015, the news comes “to weave” to performance. Its “minute” will be a dance of hands on a black background that day. “I started going to protests”, “to bear witness for natural environments, for the planet, for the defense of sites, for the right to be different”she explains. After the health crisis, we see it in hospital departments, nursing homes…
In 2020, on the first day of confinement, it opened its “protocol” (a few rules that she has laid down to succeed in her minute) to everyone. And receives, in the first month, some 5,000 videos from “people of all ages, men and women, from adolescents to the elderly”which she archives and posts on the internet. Some still continue, she marvels.
In 2023 and 2024, the choreographer also invited peers to take on the project: around forty responded, such as Ambra Senatore, Kaori Ito, Meg Stuart. This experience was an opportunity to develop his dance method, “the seismograph body”which she shares via workshops.
The project continues until January 14. End of story? “I think I’ll stop there,” says the dancer, who confides having “reasons to continue” and others “to stop”. The book recounting the ten years of this adventure, which appears on Monday (Les Presses du Réel editions), should help it put an end to it, she thinks.
A teacher at the Paris Conservatory, Nadia Vadori-Gauthier is also the choreographer of a company called “The price of gasoline”. Other projects await him: a dance piece in museums “remained in suspense”a solo which questions his identity, or even a choreographic piece on Earth.
