French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Charmatz, Je suis une école
Theatre and Performance
Boris Charmatz, Je suis une école. Expérimentation, art, pédagogie
Les Prairies ordinaires
EAN: 9782350960371
Publication date: April 17, 2009
Price: 19 euros
Number of pages: 362 pages
Approximately 60 illustrations
Experimentation, art, pedagogy.
In 2003, choreographer Boris Charmatz and the edna Association launched a pedagogical research and creation project entitled Bocal. The challenge of this nomadic and temporary project was to test the school environment against aesthetics and politics by bringing together some fifteen people aged 20 to 30: dancers, a doctor, visual artists, designers, writers, a circus performer, and musicians. All embarked on an "endless" adventure; the goal was not to obtain a degree, nor to perfect their skills or acquire new techniques, but to conceive of the school as a creative force and to activate its emancipatory potential. Across various contexts, they designed their own training tools, questioned the figures of the teacher and the student, invented their own teaching methods—in short, they devised a school curriculum as a series of potential artistic acts...
This project, which interrogated the institution without seeking to establish a new model, generated a vast repertoire of ideas, debates, and proposals, hovering between action and utopia, creation and teaching. While acknowledging the limits that "reality" imposes on any practice of collective invention, Je suis une école illustrates how the pursuit of a singular pedagogy helps achieve autonomy while raising a multitude of questions. Clearly, by recounting this unprecedented experiment, Boris Charmatz confronts much broader issues. He draws upon Jacques Rancière and his "ignorant schoolmaster," Roland Barthes and the concept of idiorrhythmy, Robert Filliou and Isadora Duncan, while continuously engaging with contemporary politics through a critique of the place that art and experimentation (and thus the realm of the possible) hold in our society.
The intersections between pedagogical experimentation and contemporary artistic practice have long engaged thinkers across the humanities, particularly in French cultural and theatrical discourse. This tradition questions traditional hierarchies within institutional settings, drawing on figures who examine the dynamics of learning, authority, and creative autonomy. Within this broader intellectual landscape, the relationship between education and aesthetics is often framed as a political gesture, one that seeks to reconfigure how individuals gather, share knowledge, and imagine alternative forms of collective life outside standard academic frameworks.
Readers interested in contemporary choreography, alternative pedagogy, and the intersection of politics and artistic practice may find this volume relevant. Boris Charmatz reflects on the Bocal project, detailing how a diverse group of participants investigated the school environment through shared creation rather than formal credentialing. The text outlines the challenges of nomadic learning structures, the interrogation of teaching roles, and the generation of ideas situated between action and utopian inquiry. The work documents these experiences without offering a rigid model, instead presenting an ongoing reflection on autonomy and collective invention.