Roman photo is a choreographic process by Boris Charmatz. Its principle is simple : inspired from the book Cunningham, Half a Century of Dance by David Vaughan, the idea is to reproduce the attitudes in the photographs and to thus create, from one photo to the next, a kind of «choreographic flip book » produced in a minimal lapse of time. Such a way of writing dance is a direct echo to the approach of Merce Cunningham, a choreographer well known for having revolutionized the traditional modes of composition by resorting to the aleatory, the autonomization dance/music, the use of game rules in order to create movement beyond anything intentional.

For his arrival in Rennes, Boris Charmatz has invited a group of 22 non-dancers to activate this mechanism, thus contradicting the common view that dance should be reserved for the virtuosi.

A version of this system will be created at the Théâtre de la Ville in december 2009, as part of the festival d’Automne, for some of the ex-dancers of the Cunningham company. By proposing a wild reappropriation of the history of dance as well as a creative process open to outsiders, Roman photo is indeed one of the first gestures of the Dancing Museum !