DANSE AVEC NATHAN GOLSHEM

Every year, at the first autumn moon, Djennifer Goranitzé goes to the seashore, to a vast landfill where the military dumped her husband’s body. She calls out to him: Nathan Golshem. She calls him for days and nights on end. She strikes the earth with her feet, with scraps of metal, with her hands – she dances. She dances until Nathan Golshem returns from nothingness.

Beneath the starry sky, Djennifer Goranitzé and her husband close their eyes and once again begin to speak and joke together. With a strange cheerfulness untouched by lamentation, they recall their fellow sufferers, the battles endlessly lost, the routs, the crimes they witnessed, endured, or committed. They laugh, they love each other, no longer quite knowing how much truth or fiction lies in their terrible stories.

Dance with Nathan Golshem, by Lutz Bassmann, (Éditions Verdier, 2012) - adapted from the back-cover text

This literary concert emerged from the sonic explorations that Laëtitia Pitz and Xavier Charles undertook around the vast fictional universe of Antoine Volodine, whose constellation of authors includes Lutz Bassmann, one of his heteronyms.

Following Mevlido Calls Mevlido by Antoine Volodine, created in 2016 – a work conceived as both a musical and visual composition and presented at venues including the Scène nationale de Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, the Cité musicale-Metz, the Scène nationale d’Orléans and the Scène nationale du Mans – we have invited the Franco-Norwegian quartet Dans les arbres to bring their vibrant, airborne music into dialogue with the narrative of Dance with Nathan Golshem, offering a singular moment of improvisation. The quartet becomes a quintet.

Together, we carry the breath of this song of resistance.

Laëtitia Pitz