In Martyr, choreographer Malika Djardi pays tribute to her mother, Marie Bernadette Philipon, a resident in a nursing home living with Alzheimer’s disease. Between the mother, appearing on screen, and the daughter, present on stage, an intensely embodied and deeply intimate filial duet unfolds. Here, dance becomes an archaeology of memory, giving form to the enduring strength of their bond.

“Through dance, my mother transforms her suffering into a state of presence that I find extraordinary an almost pure way of being in the world. It is as though what she carries is transformed, becoming lighter, almost secondary. There is something absolute, something mysterious, in that.”

Martyr exists in the space between suffering and grace: the suffering of isolation and illness, and the grace of gesture, of prayer.

“My mother is a deeply religious person. I have often felt that her prayers resemble exercises in contemporary dance the swaying of the body, the sensation of weight shifting and pouring through it, recalling Steve Paxton’s standing still practice.”

“My mother’s dance follows its own path.”

With Martyr, memory is invoked precisely at the moment it begins to disappear. The work draws on the memory of movement as much as musical memory.

“I want to connect the audience’s musical memories with my mother’s and my own, like a medley that has been taken apart and stretched out. You’ll find traces of ballroom dances tango, paso doble, jive, cha-cha but also reinterpretations of songs by Rihanna, Schubert, and Françoise Hardy, whom my mother loves very much.”

“Alzheimer’s is made up of fragments, of complete impermanence. What she creates is fleeting, fragile.”

“I had never seen my mother dance before this project. And yet my parents met in a dance hall. I found myself wondering where her gestures came from. The research began in that hybrid space between the traces of codified dances and the freedom my mother offers me through her own movement.”

“A movement is nothing without the way it is inhabited.”

Alongside Martyr, Malika Djardi is developing a documentary that follows the creative process behind the work. How do we care for another person? Touch, care, and the body lie at the heart of the film. But the documentary also seeks to address life in nursing homes, isolation, the experience of being constrained, and the challenges of creating a choreographic work despite the loss of language and mobility.

“I find it profoundly beautiful that dance allows us to share a moment that exists only in the present. Alzheimer’s frees us from both the past and the future. It compels us to keep learning all over again. And there is beauty in being forced to relearn. Everything becomes new. Perhaps we must learn to unlearn before we can truly begin to live?”

MARTYR

World Premiere
27 March 2024
Théâtre de l’Oiseau-Mouche, in partnership with Le Gymnase CDCN Roubaix

4–5 April 2024
Le Dancing – CDCN Dijon Bourgogne–Franche-Comté

Production: STAND Association

Co-productions and support: Charleroi Danse; Le Dancing – Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National de Dijon Bourgogne–Franche-Comté; RAMDAM, Un Centre d’Art (Experimental Support Programme); Montpellier Danse 2022/2023, as part of the residency programme at Agora – Cité Internationale de la Danse; Le Gymnase – Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National de Roubaix; Ballet national de Marseille (Accueil Studio programme).

Residencies: Centre National de la Danse (Pantin and Lyon) and BIRD Studio