GIMME A BREAK !!! (2023) - Baptiste Cazaux

GIMME A BREAK !!! is a quest for catharsis. Borrowing from the vocabulary of rave music, meditative practices and headbanging, Baptiste Cazaux continues his research into emotional peace and detachment, which he sees as a survival strategy in the face of capitalism. In a duet with loudspeakers, the choreographer composes a deregulated space-time, full of complexities and contradictions, in search of a vital and necessary impulse.

After EXERCICE DE STYLES # 2 (2019) and perfect pitch (2021), GIMME A BREAK !!! is Baptiste Cazaux’ third personal project. The premiere series took place from 6 till 9 September 2023 at La Bâtie - Festival de Genève (L’Abri, CH).

In January 2024, Baptiste participated in the platform CANAL 2024 organised by CN D - Centre national de la Danse (Pantin), at the invitation of CCN de Grenoble. Watch here the interview (10 min).

In 2025-2026, Baptiste will create That’s twisted.

UPCOMING DATES

  • 24.01.2025 | Festival Trente Trente, TnBA, Bordeaux (FR)

  • 25.01.2025 | Festival Trente Trente, TnBA, Bordeaux (FR)

  • 07.02.2025 | Kaserne Basel, Basel (CH)

  • 08.02.2025 | Kaserne Basel, Basel (CH)

  • 05.04.2025 | Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR)

  • 06.04.2025 | Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR)

  • 25.04.2025 | (B)its of Dance, Brugge (BE) - Première en Belgique

PREVIOUS DATES

  • 06.09.2023 | La Bâtie - Festival de Genève, L’Abri, Genève (CH) - PREMIERE

  • 07.09.2023 | La Bâtie - Festival de Genève, L’Abri, Genève (CH)

  • 08.09.2023 | La Bâtie - Festival de Genève, L’Abri, Genève (CH)

  • 09.09.2023 | La Bâtie - Festival de Genève, L’Abri, Genève (CH)

  • 08.12.2023 | Festival Danse Dense, Théâtre Berthelot, Paris (FR)

  • 26.01.2024 | (extrait) CANAL, CN D- Centre national de la Danse, Paris (FR)

  • 05.03.2024 | Les Printemps de Sévelin, Théâtre Sévelin 36, Lausanne (CH)

  • 06.03.2024 | Les Printemps de Sévelin, Théâtre Sévelin 36, Lausanne (CH)

  • 19.03.2024 | + de Genres, KLAP Maison pour la Danse, Marseille (FR)

  • 06.04.2024 | Happy Days, Pôle-Sud CDCN, Strasbourg (FR)

  • 28.06.2024 | Le Grütli, Genève (CH)

  • 05.07.2024 | Festival de la Cité, Lausanne (CH)

  • 06.07.2024 | Festival de la Cité, Lausanne (CH)

  • 09.07.2024 | Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo (IT)

  • 10.07.2024 | Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo (IT)

  • 11.07.2024 | Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo (IT)

  • 23.08.2024 | BMotion, OperaEstate, Bassano del Grappa (IT)

  • 15.09.2024 | Venere in Teatro, Forte Marghera, Venezia Mestre (IT)

  • 07.12.2024 | CN D - Centre national de la Danse, Paris (FR)

 

GIMME A BREAK !!! - a project by Baptiste Cazaux (45’, 2023)

Concept, choreography and performance: Baptiste Cazaux Music: Être Peintre Artistic assistant: Lisa Laurent Sound: Gaspard Perdrisat Light: Justine Bouillet Dramaturgy: Johanna Hilari Administration/Production/Swiss Distribution: Yamina Pilli – Ohlala production International Distribution: Rue Branly – Quentin Legrand

Production: HONEYHONEYDANCEDANCE Coproduction: La Bâtie - Festival de Genève, L’Abri, Théâtre Sévelin 36, KLAP Maison pour la danse Supports: Accompanied by CN D - Centre national de la danse (Lyon), Residency support in the frame of programme Danse & Dramatugie: Sudpol Luzern, ROXY Birsfelden, Réseau Grand Luxe (2021-2022), Société Suisse des Auteurs (SSA), Pro Helvetia, Ernst Göhner Stiftung Acknowledgements: Pascal Neyron, Marc Streit, Pauline Coquart

photos © Morgan Carlier Van Elsande, Nelson Schaub

GIMME A BREAK !!! is a work that disorients like a wild road taken from Lynch, a dead-end that turns your head upside down. The strangeness of a work that bursts in like a crash test. GIMME A BREAK !!! is a form that doesn't deal with details, it’s dry and radical, a block of thought and concrete. It takes real courage to face an audience with a form that dares the possibly annoying repetition of the same gesture. Baptiste Cazaux steps forward, without hesitation, assured, focused, in the crosshairs of the audience. The spectacular tension, the muscle and vertebrae of the form, also comes from this exacerbated relationship. (...) GIMME A BREAK !!!, like a machine to test the endless opening and closing of an Ikea sofa bed, probes the wear and tear of the body just as it does the wear and tear of the spectacular object through a kind of 2.0 possession ritual. Mechanical and deeply human through the very person at play and at risk, Baptiste Cazaux is definitely quite bold.
Nicolas Thevenot, Un Fauteuil pour l’Orchestre, 07.12.24

A choreography for seven bodies: one human and six non-human, belonging to medium-sized speakers. (…) In the description of this choreography, Cazaux speaks of the depression experienced during the pandemic lockdowns and the solace found in meditation and music. GIMME A BREAK!!! seems to be an archival-affective journey back to that period.
In the first part, the performer, dressed in attire suitable for a Zoom meeting (a striped shirt and underwear), fiddles with long cables lying on the stage. He connects and disconnects them from the speakers, which respond with bizarre sounds. The space is filled with fragments of peculiar, thundering, and screeching compositions, alongside sudden snaps and rustles that pierce the air. Cazaux rearranges the speakers, altering the stage's architecture, as if the performance started too early—before everything was ready for dancing. This kind of exposure of the technological workshop is organically embedded in the performance's dramaturgy, which gradually charges and accelerates, culminating in an energetic storm that is as ecstatic as it is a thunderous fury seeking release. The performer's body synchronizes perfectly with this process. Initially, it seems calm, present almost indifferently. Once the arrangement is complete and the speakers—partners—are finally set, the performer approaches them, and they inject an impulse of movement into their skin. The subsequent choreographies are very dynamic and quickly deplete, but their duration gradually extends. Eventually, Cazaux becomes a wild, untamed vibration that suddenly and violently breaks into the audience space or, in a frenzied rage, lifts one of the speakers as if intending to smash something with it. In the pauses between the choreographic episodes, the performer rests, sits down, leans his tired head on his hands, sinking into the stage's silence. Cazaux's performance oscillates between conflicting qualities: total engagement and relinquishment; headbanging appears in the choreography (a feverish, energetic shaking of the head to the music), as well as meditative stillness. The body here “ignites,” but does not overheat. It acts against the capitalist logic of extreme self-exploitation, resisting exhaustion.
Alicja Muller, Didaskalia.pl, juillet 2024

After all, this is what Baptiste Cazaux is asking of the spectators in GIMME A BREAK !!! in which the performer asks himself to calm down, to have a break in the frenetic flow of daily life. Cazaux enters the scene, stares into the eyes of the spectators and changes the position of the amplifiers in space. It is as if he were looking for the right harmony, the right sound, the sound space in which to act out his ritual, in which to calm his frenzy, in which to seek a possible stupor that could lead to oblivion of himself and the world. The artist never stops casting his eyes on the public gathered in the church of San Giovanni. The look is challenging but at times it also seems to ask for help, the movements are fast and nervous, the walk is decisive, the rave atmosphere, the headbanging (the violent movements of the head in time to the music) is obsessive, everything leads to an exhaustion that unites the artist and those who witness his work. In the end what remains is the sweat, the effort, the lost gaze of Baptiste Cazaux, a young performer who offers his all, looking for a possible break that can reconcile him with the world or temporarily distance him from reality to stop suffering.
- Nicola Arrigoni, Sipario, 16.09.24

[ Interview ] I see music as a vector of imagination and energy. For me, it is both a starting point, a support, and a subject in my performances. I often begin my creations by trying to define a "mood" in music. I view sound as a playing partner, but also as a driving force for aesthetic, conceptual, and emotional information. (…) GIMME A BREAK !!! is my second collaboration with musician Nelson Schaub. We worked a lot simultaneously in the studio. The sound dramaturgy and the choreography were thus created in parallel and fed off each other. Sound brought movement, both danced and technical – I’m referring here to the manipulation of various speakers that I plug and unplug – and dance transformed the sound. I like to imagine that my practice of dance is also a sound practice. It is in this space that I feel aligned and fulfilled.
Interview with Wilson le Personnic, July 2024

[ Interview ] Baptiste Cazaux, rhythm in his skin - After a presentation at + de Genres festival in Marseille, the multidisciplinary artist from Bayonne is preparing to continue his journey with GIMME A BREAK!!!.
Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore, L’oeil d’Olivier, 10.04.24

Just the title and the three exclamation points that conclude it set the tone of Baptiste Cazaux's piece. GIMME A BREAK!!! resonates like an emergency in a busy and fast-paced daily life. With this solo, which draws on the sounds of raves but also meditative techniques and headbanging – a style of dance with very violent gyrations of the head –, Baptiste Cazaux stages his desire to abandon in a capitalist world which is always rushing further away. Having trained in classical dance, then performing at the Geneva Ballet, he collaborated with the choreographers Jan Martens, Ayelen Parolin and Katerina Andreou, while creating his own pieces. Be careful, warns the choreographer, who dialogues in the room with loudspeakers: the show is played to very loud music and includes stroboscopic effects.
Rosita Boisseau, Télérama, 28.11.23

[ Portrait ] Trained in classical dance, Baptiste Cazaux nevertheless prefers rave to romantic ballet: “I have a love-hate relationship with this technique. If it forged my body with precision and rigor, I do not believe in the supremacy of this academicism,” says the 26-year-old. (…) His latest piece, GIMME A BREAK!!! has as its starting point a remedy for depression developed during quarantine: an alternation of musical mix and transcendental meditation on rave music. With headbanging and speakers spewing drum'n'bass, orchestrated by Nelson Schaub, he above all outlines a political project: "I see this piece as a physical response to the system in which we operate. It's a catharsis. Letting go becomes a survival strategy in the face of capitalism,” concludes the choreographer. A joyful way to campaign.
Belinda Mathieu, Télérama Sortir, 22.11.23

A solo charged with electronic music where the body resonates with the sound. (...) Inspired as much by a techno grammar as by meditative practices allowing the forgetting of oneself in iteration, Baptiste Cazaux lets go of reality and lets himself be carried by a force which carries him as close as possible to his spiritual aspirations. The object that emerges is a sort of performative UFO, which distills its vital, complex power over the long term. A unique artist to follow…
Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore, loeildolivier.fr, 10.09.23

In the dance section of La Bâtie, this beginning of the week was marked by the alliances of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker with Bach and Baptiste Cazaux with rave music. (...) One might think the French twenty-something Baptiste Cazaux at the antipodes of an empress such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. It is true that the past from which the dancer draws his aesthetic references for his third creation dates back only to the 1970s – with this heavy metal marked by the practice of headbanging – as well as to the rave parties which flourished thereafter. However, in addition to seeing him meticulously move six speakers on the stage of L’Abri, his “GIMME A BREAK!!!” reveals a virtuosity so millimeter that it is reminiscent of the requirement of the Flemish [choreographer]. The electronic music of Nelson Schaub (aka Être Peintre) shakes the young man dressed in briefs and a striped shirt. He nods his upper body in a kind of repetitive and frenzied acquiescence, of which the performer seems prisoner. With each unexpected relaxation, the possessed savors the break: he sits down, sponges himself, rests his brutalized head, before being seized by a new trance. While no speech comes to adulterate this co-production of La Bâtie, it is impossible not to read in it, beyond the praise for letting go, a big no to “capitalist” overheating.
Katia Berger, Tribune de Genève, 07.09.23

[ Portrait ] Baptiste Cazaux : creation as an outlet
Angèle Cartier, Epic Magazine, 18.02.23