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Boris Charmatz
10000 gestures
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"I envision a choreographic forest in which no dancer ever repeats any of the gestures, each of which will be shown only once and will vanish as soon as it has been executed, like an ode to the impermanence of the art of dance.”
— Boris Charmatz to The New York Times


In his most ambitious stage work to date, Boris Charmatz amasses a choreographic storm of movements assembled by more than 20 dancers each executing thousands of actions over an hour. Each gesture is unique, not to be repeated, and evaporates as soon as it is completed. Alluding to the ephemeral nature of dance, Charmatz’s work—which is set to Mozart’s Requiem, a glorious meditation on death—is a statement on the transient nature of being. The inspiration for 10000 gestures came to Charmatz while he was staging his piece, Levée des Conflits Extended, which is a study in permanence and immobility, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013. Charmatz set out to create the opposite effect in 10000 gestures.

Tickets from $35

NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl
New York, NY 10012

Co-presented with NYU Skirball
Supported by the Hermès Foundation within the framework of the New Settings Program.

Supported by FUSED: French U.S. Exchange in Dance, a program of FACE Foundation in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. This program is made possible thanks to the support of the Florence Gould Foundation, Institut français Paris, French Ministry of Culture, and private donors. Additional funding has been provided by the CHANEL Foundation.
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About the Artists



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French choreographer Boris Charmatz is widely celebrated for his radical approach to contemporary dance. Since 2009, Charmatz has been the director of the Rennes & Brittany National Choreographic Centre, transforming it into the Museum of Dance (Musée de la danse). He has recently presented work to great acclaim at Sadler’s Wells, Tate Modern, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.