Sport Fiction

The Ballet National de Marseille unexpectedly questions the relationship between sport, dance, and image.

Sport Fiction is based on the fact that the advent of sport as a social organization and the beginnings of artistic modernity are contemporary, that sport is increasingly present in contemporary art, and that sport is a true mythology (the establishment of a sports ideology in major events relayed around the world by the media contributes to the process of globalization by providing, through screens, the illusion of a global community). The Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of Frédéric Flamand, unexpectedly questions the relationship between sport, dance, and image. The gestures of athletes, their fluidity, often resemble choreographed movements. Sport Fiction highlights the new aesthetics of the body that are emerging: rituals, dress codes, the dream of surpassing oneself, performance, competition, in a worldview that stimulates certain behaviors: youth, beauty, vitality. Blurring these codes in a hybrid, offbeat show for the general public provides a festive reflection, a different perspective on the relationship between dance and sport.

Sport Fiction humorously draws us into the conviviality of sport, its excesses, the passion shared with dance, and the search for personal fulfillment, immersing us in pop media culture. Through the prism of sport and dance, this creation is also intended as a humanistic, scientific, and poetic tribute to some of the great precursors of our modernity: Marey and Muybridge, among others, who brought about a change in the representation of the body in the aesthetic and social spheres: Muybridge in relation to the decomposition of movement with his extraordinary bestiary “Animal and Human Locomotion”; Marey, inventor of chronophotography, who, by filming athletes, sought to discover the laws of movement by studying walking, jumping, running, and the forces involved in their execution. The body becomes an object of knowledge, pleasure, and power.

The dance event with contemporary and historical films—mechanisms of sport and work—draws a parallel between the reshaping of the body at the beginning of the 20th century and the contemporary body: body management and its immersion in the omnipresent world of images.

Source: BNM