The Best American Poetry

Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s The Mutes makes my uncanny familiar [by Sean Ashton]

Behind the nettles, the wandering un-choral of Lina Lapelytè’s ”The Mutes”, turned the strangeness of ”I have never driven a 7.5 ton truck” into the normative, authoritative, of a Pater Noster. Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Rasa J.

When Lina Lapelytè asked if she could use my novel Living in a Land as the basis for a new choral performance called The Mutes, which had been commissioned by Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, I said ‘yes’ immediately, without asking anything about the project.

I had seen Lina’s song cycle Candy Shop: the Circus several times. I was impressed by how this live show – in which an all-female ensemble reinterprets iconic rap songs by male artists – transforms existing material into something radically different, almost antithetical, to the original authors’ concerns. In the pantheon of unusual covers, her version of 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” – a folk-cum-sea-shanty take on his 2005 release – is the equal of Devo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

As a composer and re-arranger, Lina has the ability to make the familiar uncanny by using alien time-signatures and unforeseen lyrical scansion, and by filtering contemporary works through melodies that sometimes sound – to my ear – mediaeval.

But what would she do with Living in a Land? Being a fictional memoir by someone who can only construct sentences in the negative, and can thus only tell us what he has never done, no longer does, or will never do, the book is already uncanny, or at least strange. I’m tempted to think, as I look back on the three-hour performance of The Mutes on the opening night of the 22^nd June, that Lina has done the reverse of what she achieved with “Candy Shop”: rendered the uncanny familiar.

The Mutes consists of thirteen singers repeating lines and phrases from Living in a Land in a carefully rehearsed fifty-minute cycle, performed six times without a break. Thanks to its long duration, and the difficulty in determining where the cycle begins and ends, lines like ‘I’ve never driven a 7.5 ton truck’, or ‘It is unlikely that I shall ever be invited back to my old school, to show what I have made of myself’ slowly acquire an official-sounding, almost catechistic authority.

By the end of the première, I was hearing my text as if it were the “Lord’s Prayer” (“Our Father”), despite the ultra-mundane quality of the language (which Lina perhaps sees as an anti-libretto). Also adding to this feeling that my words had taken on a peculiar moral weight was fashion designer Egle Cekanaviciute’s thrillingly inscrutable costuming style, which made singers seem to have stepped in from a near future.

And then there were the nettle bushes installed throughout the gallery, around which the performers wandered, pausing to offer solos, sometimes singing in unison. Nettle bushes are, for me, the staple backdrop of a certain kind of childhood recollection: first kisses, egg-collecting, lighting fires, fighting – it all seems to have happened in the nettles, a plant that has since become an instant nostalgia-signifier.

But most telling was the constraint imposed by Lapelytè on her performers: they should have ‘no musical ear’, or, crudely put, should not be able to sing. This constraint echoed the constraint of my book, and it was this that gave my text an unexpectedly universal quality.

Suddenly, my outsider-narrator – my own personal ‘Mute’ – was a bona fide citizen. And the fact that my Mute’s alienated statements were being sung by a whole chorus of Mutes lent them an emotional register that caught me off-guard: the words seemed to issue more directly from their characters than if they had been delivered by virtuoso performers, who might have smothered their content with theatrical professionalism.

But more than this, the cast’s naked, diffident delivery made me realise that we all speak from an alienated perspective, from a sense of separateness from others, from the very world we inhabit, at the same time as coexisting with others, at the same time as being in and of that world.

The transformation of my work in Lina’s The Mutes makes for interesting comparison with other spoken-word extracts from Living in a Land, such as the one I recorded for the journal Inscription in 2020. There’s also my 2018 collaboration with Anat Ben David, “Living C# Minor”, a thirteen-minute composition that sets my voice to a plaintive electronic arrangement, towards the end accompanied by her own voice, in a style that ranges from sung phrases to guttural croaks and shrieks. In Living C# Minor there is a sense of Anat performing behind my back, as though I am unaware of what she is doing that I find just as moving as the collective iteration of the novel at Lafayette.

Perhaps the verbal constraints and repetition in my writing can seem arch and almost painful to the ear when heard only through my voice. But something else happens when other folk get involved. It touches me that musicians and singers should be attracted to a book that, at the time of writing, seemed so despairingly solipsistic, such a doubtful and solitary gambit. I wonder if there will be any takers for Massive Massive Oil Slick, my follow-up to Living in a Land? Massive Massive, in the form of a prophecy, is written solely in sentences that begin with the verbs ‘expect’ and ‘suppose’. Thanks to my experience with Lina’s The Mutes, perhaps I will publish it only so that some other artist can give it its true form.

Sean Ashton

Sean Ashton lives in London and teaches fine art at Leeds Beckett University and the Royal College of Art.  An associate editor at MAP Magazine and an award-winning critic for Art Review, until 2017, Ashton is a contributor ofpoems, essays and stories to publications including Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma,Poetry Salzburg Review and Artenol. In addition to Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque 2017), Ashton’s fiction includes Sunsets & Dogshits (Alma Books 2008), a collection of reviews of imaginary artwork and Sampler, (Valley Press 2020), entries from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets. In 2023, The Way to Work, a fourth literary surprise, will appear with Salt Publishing.

Wanted: A five-points-on-a-post-it-note guide to enjoying live dance performance [by Tracy Danison]

As this scene from "L'Aveuglement" ("Blindness") dance performance by Mylene Benoit reminds us, live dance performance is exciting and important. But spectators need access – initiation and apprenticeship – to fully enjoy and appreciate it over the long term. Participate in putting together a "(Mortimer J. Adler Memorial) Five-points-on-a-post-it-note guide to enjoying live dance performance". Photo © Patrick Berger

One of those “dramatic-moments” videos opened the National Dance Theater’s 22-23 season presentation. These days, everybody does one: it’s supposed to get your pulse racing.

This one made me reflect that while enjoying live performance-dance requires your initiation, apprenticeship and time, this video-stuff requires only your time.

Only your time because, whatever the intention behind it, video’s light-flicker technology appeals directly and insistently to a very hopped-up predator brain that has evolved to focus on movement – falling, leaping, undulating, surging: apples, wolves, butts, enemies.

Our physiological-psychology means that whatever the artistic intention behind a video, the medium is always the message: your brain initiates and apprentices whether you enjoy the intention or not.

Nowadays, every kid initiates and apprentices video at birth, for life.

On the other hand, the medium of live dance performance is not reflex but a process of cognition and perception that ranges around “expectation”, “puzzling”, “patterning”, “recognition”. A real-time action flow, a uniquely individualized, nonverbal and naturally ephemeral, repertory along with a spectator’s need to engage, means that, it takes a relatively long time to initiate then apprentice to it. Think of poker or chess or other card or board games. Nobody learns them in a day and it takes quite a while to recognize a good game, let alone become a good player.

Figuring out a method to initiate and apprentice a potential spectator-participant is not important because video otherwise “out-competes” live dance performance, but because the art forms are two different natures. I know this seems obvious: everybody knows that a painting of a thing is not the thing painted. And, mostly, that is interesting. But it doesn’t matter much.

When it comes to real experience of people, there is no substitute: the “metaverse” is just another experience, not experience.  And, when it comes to experience of live dance performance, indeed, experience of any movement art, the medium as a medium changes it, fundamentally. Kiss a video representation of your sweetheart. Some kiss, eh? So it is that when you watch a “dance performance video” you are not experiencing recorded dance performance but a recording.

So I am not making a plea for an obsolete art form: most dance performance lays ahead of us. My concern is movement.

Dance performance is the artistic expression of the natural phenomenon of movement. I believe that dance is something like an intentional concatenation of “happening, and sensibility that enables Imagination”. Imagination – the state beyond words where truths no longer hold – is what the spectator-participant should get from dance. Rûmî’s Poem of the Atomssays about dance what I’m trying to say:

 

Rise, Sun !

The atoms dance !

Souls undone in ecstasy dance !

I’ll whisper it, what the dance comes to.

The atoms in the air and the atoms in the desert,

You should know, the atoms are like crazy folk,

Each one, happy or poor, each

Crazy for the Sun, of whom nothing can be said.

 

Dance, friends! Without Imagination, forgetting we are atoms swirling, without getting in front of that sun, we are lost! Forever.

It is only through Imagination we’re going to get out of the existential mess we are in. And, that, in a nutshell, is why it is important in my view to figure out ways to initiate and apprentice people to dance performance (see my essays: Movement, Life, Dance-nature and the value in Dance-practice & On the value of being there with: Dance, the “art” of movement & The return of the mountebanks to Paris: the imperative pleasure of live performance.)

In a long, very enlightening, conversation, choreographer Mylène Benoît argued that dance performance should be part of school curriculum, like reading and writing (see : Water and bread, not wine and cake: choreographer Mylène Benoît speaks up for dance). She’s right, of course.

But in the same way that having your letters won’t make you functionally literate, knowing how to execute a pas de bourrée and a pirouette won’t make you a dancer or a dance performance spectator.

For reading, as for dance performance, initiation and apprenticeship are key to skill acquisition and, in the end, key to enjoying the full fruits of appreciation. Just for starters, each experience acquires a moment, a link with the wide world: Rûmî’s poems in a love letter, Trollope’s novels at a back table of the Café Med in Berkeley or advertising on the internet, Fabrice Ramalingon’s choreographies of pure feeling in the playground intimacy of Atelier de Paris or Nathalie Béasse’sperformance theatricals in the crowd and warmth of Théâtre de la Bastille or the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris dancing choreographer Mats Ek’s Carmen under a ceiling painted by Marc Chagall …

To initiate and apprentice readers, reading teachers use many different learning methods around a few simple keys – interestingly, most of the keys don’t actually fit the door – and apply them to a wide variety of material. Dance performance lovers need to do the same?

Remember Mortimer J. Adler, the guy who boiled up a “Western Philosophy” with six component authors? He may have had a too-broad target and a tendentious point of view, but Mortimer J. had the right idea. He saw that democratizing higher education required tools of initiation and apprenticeship, so, in addition to his philosophy stuff, he wrote How to Read a Book, a  guide to effective reading.

I believe the movement arts could use a little Mortimer J. Adler Thought: A (very, very) abbreviated, five-points-on-a-post-it-note, How to initiate and apprentice yourself to live dance-performance – an incompletely essential guide to eventually appreciating it.  So, over the next year or so, for every live dance-performance I go to, I’m going to do a limited survey. After each performance I will ask a. the person next to me or b. the piece’s creator or c. one of its performers or d. technical partners (lights, costumes, electricians, musicians) to tell me the three or five things a spectator needs to see or hear to have enjoyed or not what we just saw. I’ve made up an interview protocol for it, described just below.

Join me in the search for a five-points-on-a-post-it-note guide to enjoying live dance performance

See a live dance performance – it doesn’t really matter what. Use the interview protocol to prepare yourself and record your results. You can even interview yourself.

Post your three to five “keys” or “dance performance access points” in the commentary to this article or send them by mail to MJA.danceperformance.guide@gmail.com . Add the name of the performance and the date you saw it, along with a link to the summary and details of the performance.

Just a caution. Most people, most of the time, will respond with value judgments that justify liking or disliking what they have seen. They’ll cite “good dancing” or “wonderful music” or even tell you their critical theory or even meet your simple request with incredulity. As in life generally, it’s hard to get useable answers.

Make sure the things or events named by the interviewee appear, are seeable or hearable by a third party, at least once during the performance. Also, make sure the interviewee concretely locates the things or events named in the performance rollout. Finally, it’s a good idea to interview yourself before you interview somebody else. Not only will it help to better spot what you’re looking for but also help you take some distance from the interviewee’s propos.

Interview protocol

“Five-points-of access-on-a-post-it-note, how to initiate and apprentice to live dance-performance”

Argument:

“I would like to have the ‘keys’ or ‘points of access’ to this performance. In the order they happened or appeared, could you help me by naming the three or five important things or events that made it enjoyable or not enjoyable for you? This will take us from half to a full hour.”

For each thing or event named, four “clauses” in one response entry:

“In the order they happened in the dance performance, could you A. name the three or five things or events that you think of as keys or access points to this performance? Can you B. place each one during the performance? Can you say why each one was C. important to the success of the performance (Or: C. what role did it have in the performance rollout) ? Can you D. rate each one’s importance on a scale from one to nine?”

1. A. (Put a name on the thing or event.) What was the (first, second, third, fourth or fifth) thing or event that you saw or that happened?
2. B.(Locate the thing or event.) Where did the thing or event named happen in the performance or what was happening on stage when the important thing or event happened?
3. C. (What role did the thing or event have in the performance/choreography?) What did the thing or event do for the performance? How did the thing or event affect the performance?
4. D. (What importance for you?) On a scale of one to nine (1-9), how would you rate the importance of this thing or event for accessing or enjoying the performance?

Example: response entry 

A.) A silent & dark stage, B.) just at the beginning and lasts about a minute until the room seems restless C.) and we feel like we’re part of the space but D.) if it didn’t happen I would have still enjoyed it, but it added, rate it a four.

Example: full interview note

"Atom Dance", performance by Mortimer B. Adler, 8 pm, 26 september 2022, https://atomicrumonics.mba.org

1.  A silent & dark stage, just at the beginning, about a minute into the darkness when the room seems restless – establishes experiential space – Importance 4;
2. Noise – some weird music comes in when the guy in the violet tights on the left jumps on to the platform. Noise links the rhythm of the experiential space to performers and to choreographer – Importance 5;
3. Controlled physical contacts, when the sound changes about 10 minutes into the performance and all the performers suddenly join hands in a rosette then separate and join in smaller groups… – physical contact establishes relationships and relationship languages – Importance 8;
4. A main person, at the end of the personal contacts about 10 minutes into the show, the short girl with the Afro stepped into center stage – a main person makes a point of view, a story to watch – Importance 8;
5. A people story, the girl with the Afro danced with all the other performers for about three minutes stage left near the flowers – a story establishes sense, I can’t see something unless it seems to go someplace. A story goes someplace – Importance 9.

Follow-up questions and comments: Avoid commenting on anything said in the interview. A response may intrigue you. Ask a follow-up only once you’ve finished the interview and stay focused on the interview: “In point five, you say “a people story” is important. In this performance, what was the people story for you?” 

Post your three to five “keys” or “dance performance access points” in the commentary to this article or send them by mail to MJA.danceperformance.guide@gmail.com . Add the name of the performance and the date you saw it, along with a link to the summary and details of the performance.

Conundrums and sweet embrace: Aurélie Gandit’s “Visite dansée” with La Dame à la licorne [by Tracy Danison]

Aurélie Gandit’s Visite dansée adds movement  to a mix of fact and informed commentary, adding spectrum to the understanding of "The Lady with the unicorn". Photo © Michel Petit

Life can seem grim lately: radical nostalgia-ism rampant in the homeland, pestilence sweeping the globe, war in Europe, betrayal everywhere. There is nothing especially odd about these particular grimnesses, but the, somehow Victorian, alt.-reality script does give it all a certain short-hair bristling, pre-episode strangeness.

There are demands, for example, that a person’s uterus status restrict that person’s right to travel. A Tzar of All the Russias, formerly an agent of a notorious communist secret police service, bombards the gates of united Europe to the applause of obscure zealots hosted by nameless billionaires. Ambitious villains, cheek by jowl with messianic demagogues, plot overthrows of otherwise happy unions.

I’ve been enjoying myself pretty well, though. Despite the alt. script, the real world of good, old, solid conundrums and sweet embrace flickers on, like General Hospital on dead Grandma Tracy’s TV.

Just the other day, for instance, poor and inflation-rattled as I am supposed to be, I had the pleasure of a ristretto coffee made from beans plucked from a wild aboriginal coffee tree. Coffee, apparently, is native to a remote mountain province of Ethiopia, someplace near where Lucy woke. And the experience of getting the ristretto was as charming and enjoyable as drinking it was interesting and pleasurable.

The wild beans are bought by Early Bird, a little stand inside the Marché Beauvau on Place d’Aligre, the venture of a pleasant Franco-Irish couple. Together they roast the beans then sell them, and many other types of coffee, besides, to the public. They also sell cups of coffee to market-goers; that’s how I got the ristretto and the beans, going to the market on Sunday morning.

The bluff, well-made Irish fella took my order. Composed and busy behind a sleek, complicated-looking machine, the French woman drew my ristretto. The fella served me as I stood. I went out front and sat on an as-you-please bench set along the front window and threw the ristretto back. That done, I went and asked the fella to recommend me a coffee. He sold me on the wild beans, quite pricey. But no blarney.

Those wild aboriginal beans from provincial Ethiopia deliver all the savor and lyric he said they would.

Gandin dances inside the frame of the tapestries. Photo © Michel Petit

Speaking of the world’s sweet embrace … Not long after I drank that ristretto and got those aboriginal beans, I had the pleasure to experience a Visite danséechoreographed around the famous conundrum of a set of six medieval (+/- 1500 CE)  tapestries called La Dame à la licorne (“The Lady with the Unicorn”). The Visite, the brainchild of choreographer and dancer Aurélie Gandit and her troupe cie La Brèche, adds dance to the usual mix of fact and informed commentary and took place this past June in the recently renovated Hôtel de Cluny, Paris’ museum of medieval art.

The Visite was an intellectual and esthetic experience inside an innocent adventure, like my ristretto, a pleasure in the experience of it and enjoyable in the getting to it.

Aurelie Gandin led our group through the halls and stairs of the museum and, finally, into the rather small, rectangular room where the tapestries hang.

It is cold. The light is buttery. We gather in a clump, toward the approximate center.

The tapestries dominate the space. Woven of silk and wool, they make the air smell strongly of old silk. Two hang at the top of the room, two more on the left-hand wall, and, 180° behind us, a fifth hangs at the bottom of the room. A sixth, labeled Mon seul desir, occupies the wall to our right.  

We all look around. Every figure in every tapestry is distinct, clear. But not bright. The hoto lies. The “washed” colors are both fill and line. Weave doesn’t bleed, even over 500 years. Each tapestry features La Dame at its center. This noble She is framed by a lion to her right and la licorne to her left. In five of the tapestries, the visual scene points one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. The sixth tapestry figures La Damein front of an open tent. “Mon seul desir” is stitched over the opening of the tent. La Dame lightly caresses a casket of jewels held out by a maid-servant.

People who have thought about La Dame à la licorne agree that whether you read the six tapestries as a single narrative or as a series of meditations or think of them singly, Mon seul desir is stuffed with possible senses and subtly compelling combinations of senses: “My true desire? My only hope? My unique wish? My sole aspiration?”

Aurélie Gandin suggests that we can take the five physical senses represented around us as a way to understand Mon seul desir, as a sixth sense – the “heart”: mon seul desir, my true desire, my only hope, my unique wish, my sole aspiration.

Placing herself toward the top of the room, Gandin asks us all to close our eyes and relax.

I feel as if a séance with La Dame will start.

When Gandin asks us to open our eyes again, she is using careful hand movements to invite us to look at the tapestry just in front of us, at the top of the room.

As she will to the end of the Visite, Gandin points the detail of the visual narrative that gives a tapestry its name. She comments iconographic details.

She dances unhurriedly but briefly and segues into the next commentary on the tapestry to her left.

Gandin’s dances are fluid, sometimes focused in her upper body and hands, sometimes on her lower body, pelvis, legs and feet – her and her heaven and earth.

Gandin keeps her dance within the visual frame of the tapestry that she has commented, that we are observing. Is this to make sure we imprint the movement into our regard?

I have no sense that she’s “dancing the story”. Her dance strikes me as her being her sensibility and experience of the tapestry as artefact, as story and as a meaning or meanings.

About a half an hour later, Mon seul desir danced, the Visite at its end, I look around at the tapestries.

I see a lot of the Tarot in La Dame à la licorne.

As for the 22 arcana of the Tarot, La Dame appears to me to be set into a very deliberated selection of iconographic elements. Accepting the deliberateness lets me see that the images and arrangements of image are less like a story and more like the precise words and word order of an incantation.

And, as an incantation, La Dame à la Licorne does as the Tarot does. First, it points two subjects – the image and its viewer. Then, where only the subject can see, it opens on to the “magic world” where desire, hope, wish and aspiration reign; beggars there can ride. Finally, as with the Tarot, the world La Dame opens onto is transition, becoming, movement.

By adding movement – I am thinking of dance here as intention delivering a unique but subtly shaping blow to movement – Aurélie Gandin adds spectrum both to the esthetic pleasure and intellectual experience La Dame à la Licorne. The result of the addition is not so much the particular choreography or the performance or the quality of dance. Rather, in mirroring the movement that La Dame points to, it is the enabler of a fuller understanding of what’s there. Like the first dance at a wedding, a Visite dansée enables other dance, other pleasures.

Put a Visite dansée (and also La Dame à la licorne) on your conundrums-and-sweet-embrace bucket list.

Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” at Lafayette Anticipations: on dance, shoes, singing and paradox in the Garden of Nettles [by Paul Tacy Danison]

Wandering carolers find themselves in the Garden of Nettles only to find their selves. From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute 

Right off, I need to claim Lina Lapelytè’s The Mutes for dance.

I do because I've come to think that, when all is said and done, dance is people at movement among life's paradoxes – The Mutes certainly has paradox. “Movement” (of eye, ear, mouth, skin, brain, consciousness) – which The Mutes has too – is the mechanism that makes us realize that all stories are as true as false. What we call “dance” sculpts, then performs, movement, enabling imagining: opposite as apposite, song as sound, stinging nettle as tickling feather, floor as foot.

Space as place, too. When Yuika Hashimoto twirled, turned and spiraled her moving reprise of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Violin Phase in 2018 in Lafayette Anticipation’s auteur space, the performance found a place; The Mutes magics space into place: the Garden of Nettles.

 

Da sein! From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute

Movement into The Mutes is through a parallel visual-culture narrative: nettles, food-weed/medicine-irritant, a pair of clogs made for a surface rather than for feet. Pairs of clogs tease the brain as I stroll glancing into the bushes for the them – they remind me: Burma Shave signs with their intriguing streaks of Midwestern jokeyness strung along the old two-lane interstates.

Strolling creates the paths I now see among stands of nettles. I am pulled into, I almost run into, a sound experience of paradox and becoming. A band of intensely ordinary carolers orderly gather in a corner in front of a pillar, held between clumps of nettles. They chant-sing “off-key” and well. They carol select stanzas from Sean Ashton’s 2017 novel Living in a Land

I’ve never gone back/I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home I’ve never gone back

To my childhood home/and found it to be emotionally sterile/

I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home

And come to the conclusion that we live

in time not place, time, not place, not place, time, not place/ 

We live in time not place/time not place/time not place/time not place/time not place

I laugh.

My guard down, in an eyeblink, a mischievous spirit flies into my ha-ha hole, gets a grip on my tongue. It takes only a second to jar me loose. I feel I’ve heard this before (without ever having heard it), without saying it, have felt it, felt it and said it, at a fancy party. Also, “Time not place” comes to me. Also, I may actually have “driven a “7.5-tonne truck”. 

Feeling tickled in place not time pulls me from memory. I listen to what I’ve seen. The caroling shapes to Song(s) of Myself(ves). The carolers shift to Intensely ordinary Selves, as true as Walt Whitman’s own. Less overblown language, too.

The Selves are zazen kinhin devotees wandering vegetable paradox, carving out a place in somebody’s else’s bijou design. A pillar of squared light and air thrusting between narrow plots of nettle becomes a multilevel pocket park where people – intent and deliberate in polyester multifiber-mix shirts and dresses, decent pants, skirts, bottoms and shoes my mom would approve – pause to breathe while waiting to move on. I add. Forever. Until.

 

I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home/And come to the conclusion that we live/in time not place, time, not place, not place, time, not place … – Sean Ashton, Living in a Land. From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute 

It's all good. Let me count the ways.

The ability to conceive then put together the elements that make my experience makes Lina Lapelytè a fine choreographer. Also a top sound and sight composer. Then, the choreographer-composer in her knows how to choose, as Buddhists say, right collaborators most apt to realize right texts, sets, cast and costumes…. A special mention here for designer Egle Cekanaviviute, whose talent for situational dress lent much to my appreciation of The Mutes’ remarkable “every-person” amateur cast. 

Finally, Lapelytè seems to enjoy the undefinable but undeniable quality of natural humor. Her work imbibes it. I didn’t just laugh inwardly and outwardly and during The Mutes. I am smiling now.

The Mutes – inaptly titled “Les Silencieux” for the Paris performance – is a fine and pleasant spur to Imagining, then, seeming to me a case study in dance, capital D. However, Lapelytè seems in the way of getting claimed for contemporary opera rather than dance-performance.

Lapelytè herself – trained up in Lithuania as a concert violinist but choosing to study sculpture in London –  has had a hand in this: her (as far as I know) first big performance is Have a good day! Opera for 10 cashiers and supermarket sounds and piano. Also, her début on the international scene follows a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for Sun & Sea, called “an opera-performance” in my promotional material and which is bluntly called opera in the little Google blurb.  

Why make even a five-line fuss about this? After all, opera is a non-objectionable genre of music. And the really good singing in the little of Lapelytè's work I’ve seen does have something of opera cliché about it. But – and maybe it’s only her natural humor at work – “opera” just doesn’t seem to be what she’s up to creatively. If Hofesh Shecter’s noisy chorus-line-like scenarios are a reflection of his creative impulse, there’s a lot more opera in him than in her.

Worse than the label’s confounding me, though, is that saying "opera" whenever Lina Lapelytè’s name comes up could limit her in terms of audience appeal. Opera is richer than performance, but there's a lot less of it.

So, in the same spirit as I claim that playwright Nathalie Béasse is a visual artist tweaked for a un-narrative theater-performance, let’s all claim that Lapelytè is a visual artist tweaked for dance-performance who delights in sound. Let's think of her as a brand: Lina Lapelytè, movement lyricist. That will get critical programmer attention!

The Mutes runs until 24 July 2022. Lapelytè will once again be imposing her fertile imagining on Parisian real estate from 18 to 22 January 2023 with stint of  Sun & Sea under the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce (the Pinault Collection).

Put Lina Lapelytè on your bucket list.

Water and bread, not wine and cake: choreographer Mylène Benoît speaks up for dance [by Tracy Danison]

WONDER by Mylène Benoît:  “Body memory working on the body present”. Photo © Fabrice Poiteaux

The portico on the Théâtre des Abbesses boasts a quote from Pina Bausch, a genius, sure, but also beloved of those who knew her: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” ... Over her writing desk, where I often sit procrastinating, my Karine, also beloved of her friends, has a brittle yellowed Post-it note with a quote from, of all people, Augustine of Hippo, a man terrified of the beat of his own heart: O, Mensch, lerne tanzen, sonst wissen, die engel im Himmel mit dir nichts anzufangen/ “O! Friend! Learn to dance or the angels will not know how to begin with you”.

These words and these persons move me.

So you’ll understand why the choreographer Mylène Benoît impressed me so during a panel discussion on the future of dance at Palais de Chaillot in Fall 2021, just when we were first coming out of lock down. Alone among the personalities involved, Benoît pointed out that dance – movement, live performance –  was a need. And in saying that, she reminded a lot of people for whom dance-performance can often be just a budget – especially in trying times –, that dance is a human need, a fundamental value - water, not wine, bread, not cake – not entertainment or a culture product. Op. cit., Augustine and Pina.

I bestirred myself to make an appointment with to learn more about Benoît’s thinking.

Until her appearance on the panel, I knew of her only through an intriguing 2018 performance piece called Gikochina-Sa / ぎこちな さ / La Maladresse (“Awkwardness”), which she created in conjunction with a 2017 residence in Japan. I saw it through the Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine Saint Denis 2018 program. Gikochina-Sa/La Maladresse explores a potential gestural and poetic language deriving from unintentional movement. Working with Atsushi Heli, an expert in the gestural repertory of Japan’s Nichibu dance genre, Benoît was seeking to create a unique – unique in the sense of un-reproducible – performance language.

During our talk in late November 2021, in Lille, where Benoît currently lives with her partner and her two young children, I realized that the Gikochina-Sa is a good introduction to what turns out to be Benoït’s ongoing quest to get a handle on the nature of dance and its representations. She’s a born intellectual with a love of matter and energy, seeing and feeling.

 

On the power of women, ARCHEE by Mylène Benoît. Photo © Delphine Lermite

While Benoît has a good hand for doing current or classic or political themes – I’m thinking here of her most recent work, Archée, touching on the power and place of women, she also tends to embed such broader questions of dance nature as “the diffusion of images and their articulation into the body” or “body knowledge and memory” or “co-opting body with image in social choreography”.

Archée makes its Paris début as I publish, at the Palais de Chaillot, National Dance Theater, from 8 to 17 June, 2022.

At some point during our long conversation does a sort of Ode to a Grecian Urn invocation. I can’t recall if it happens à propos of any one of our talking points, but she stands, walks, situates, positions and then swings her leg up from the exact join of her hip, rippling thigh, knee, ankle, foot upward until the root, arch and spread of her sole comes lightly against the flat smooth plaster of the wall just behind her chair. Judgments and terms roll over me. To me, foot and wall become numinous: I feel, “each itself, themselves together”. That’s good “dance”! Again to myself, I figure “ballet” though I can’t recall offhand such an image, let alone such a move in ballet. Maybe it’s the “gracefulness”.

Mylène Benoît today bills herself a visual artist as well as a choreographer, which she describes as doing “choral arrangement”. During our chat she says she thinks of the body as a corps sachant, “an information body” at macro and micro (cellular) level. Dance, she also tells me, is movement over which we can impose or share cultural images or emotions, or teach ourselves emotions. In this communication function, dance is “primary belonging”.

Her present thinking, Benoît says, has its origins in her first creation project, a video installation, which got her wondering about the authenticity of the images of emotions and attitudes she was using.  She wondered, for instance, whether and how the cartoon images of emotional states such as anger, sadness, or surprise derived from real body states or postures. Using short choreographies to explore the issue, she says she was surprised to understand that the images, or memes, she was using were not attached to real-body experience. They were, instead, a part of a separate narrative repertory – “figures” – representing “emotions” that may or may not exist, or, if they exist, may or may not be universally or, even, just, identifiable. In a nutshell, figures or memes are ways of talking about movement but do not describe or express it. Body movement itself references the whole movement of an individual as it interacts with and relates to itself and Others.

L’AVEUGLEMENT: “The body in transformation of forms of encounter with the world. Photo © Patrick Berger

As a result of her explorations and experience, Benoît says she determined to use only real-body experience in her choreographies. But, although movement communicates, movement is essentially “silent”.

What Benoît means by “silent”, I think, is something like “present without language”. Remember the opening scene in 2001, Space Odyssey. Some apes suddenly start whooping it up around a monolith. The whooping it up against the silent monolith enables the production of a third thing – for Kubrick, a “human” – that is different from the apes and differently perceives the monolith differently.

Clearly, movement, like the monolith, is another genre of communication to sound or figurative communication. They are not necessarily “complementary”, seeming more like two streams of water, each generating its own fluid ecology. The meaningfulness, or the “third thing” enabled, come more from proximity than otherwise.

So it is, perhaps, that Benoît takes care to call herself a “visual artist” and “choral arranger”: where the principle character is silent, how and where and with whom and who says what where are the most important ways to enable a meaningful spectator experience.

As to need, if it’s clear there’s a type of communication we call “language” and humans need its memes, figures and narratives, it’s also clear to Benoît there’s a type of communication we call “movement” that enables us to “impose and share … images and emotions”. Whether dance is more important than talk, as I think, is a matter of opinion, but that it is a human need, equal at least to language, seems to me, indisputable.

On leaving, I ask Benoit what she expects will be the result if we required kids to skill up dance as we require them to do for talk?

“The body creates, reshapes and liberates narrative," she replies. "What we’ll get is better health, more empathy and [since the process is archeological as well as teleological] … more introspection, from cell to species to personal experience."

Marie-Thérèse Allier, literary talk, dance-performance criticism [by Tracy Danison]

Caroline Breton in “Figures” by Charles Chemin, on stage at Ménagerie de Verre, Etrange cargo program 2022. Photo © Ysé-Ysé-Rouy-Giraaud

In an obituary for Marie-Thérèse Allier, the founder and leader of the iconic Ménagerie de Verre dance-performance studio, arts journalist Vincent Bouquet, quotes her as saying that the artists she’d worked with over the years “… n’hésitaient pas à casser les codes, à se mêler avec d’autres disciplines… – … never hesitated to break the codes and mix it in with other [arts] disciplines … ”. She went to characterize emerging choreographers as “risk averse”, meaning that she thought new stuff lacks “originality” and “radicality”, words meant as fulsome praise.

I think Allier’s remarks bear discussion. Not so much because it’s Allier who said it or because it’s difficult for me to see how a whole “generation” of people can “be” anything at all, let alone “risk averse” - “mediocre” -  while another “generation” is “original and “radical”.

Her words bear discussion because they are such common adjectives for dance-performance yet make no sense.

A glance at the list of La Ménagerie alumni that Bouquet includes in his article – including Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé, Daniel Larrieu, Angelin Preljocaj, Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Leroy, Mathilde Monnier, Christian Rizzo, François Chaignaud, Rodrigo Garcia, Yves-Noël Genod, Vincent Macaigne and Théo Mercier – shows technical excellence and much choreographic brilliance in these creators, but, though I’ve seen pieces that have worked well or not so well for me or for the spectators around me, I’ve seen no identifiable “risk-taking”, “originality” or “radicality”. In fact, if I were to take a trip up to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s famous P.A.R.T.S choreographic hothouse in Belgium, or stroll over to Micadanses or Atelier de Paris CNDC, I’d find artists whose approaches and creations resemble those of La Ménagerie’s stars, of each other as well as those of all European and American choreographers of the last 50 years.

Saying there’s nothing original or radical is not to say there’s nothing good. There certainly is.

And there’s risk-taking, too, but since that’s in the choreographer’s personal domain, nobody but the choreographer can see it.

“Originality” or “radicality” or “risk-taking” are literary notions applied to dance because our critical culture is so story based. You can deviate from a story-line in all sorts of original, risky or radical ways. But what’s to deviate from in movement? What can be original, risky or radical where there’s no deviation?

And, in a very real sense, the act of dance is the substance of risk, originality and radicality. A choreography, even with its clumsy and approximate instructions spattered on paper, has no line – no trace – but its already-departing movement, moment and persons. No Swan Lake to dance is Swan Lake dancing or Swan Lake danced.

Also, as far as I can judge, contemporary dance spectators don’t go to performances to see risk, originality or radicality in performance. Why would they? They go instead hoping to experience a dance moment and participate in dance’s particular energy. Personal preferences aside, it doesn’t matter to dance spectators whether they get the experience of dance from the eroticism of Paris ballet dancers doing Mats Ek’s Boléro, from admiring Jérôme Bel’s brilliant mises en exergue (spotlighting), or from contemplating M.C. Hominal sitting in the ineffable no-movement of a wet cardboard box. If it works, it works.

Anyhow, I think it’s past time to start developing a critical language that expresses more what happens in the real experience of dance. How does its staging work? What are the experiences of creators, dancers and spectators? What do these expect and how do they experience the experience of dance?

As to what happens in staging dance-performance, I think we need to build a vocabulary around the notion of staging an “irreproducible happening”, that quality that Isadora Duncan identified with “sacredness”. It seems to me that three more or less formalized “inspirations”, or “staging points”, have grown up and persisted around public performance of “happening”. Think of inspirations and staging points as identifiable quirks that show a gross tendency in individual temperament rather than an identifiable series of performance conventions such as gestures of props.

There is a temperament that systematically inspires itself from the body – modern-dance, think Martha Graham with her techniques for best uses of the body inside and outside, and of all those dance greats of the 40, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s … of TV and music video choreographers who work endlessly on the technique of getting the body to show something inside it or outside: music, passion, self, a story. A second temperament inspires itself from ideas or situations – concepts, think Yves Klein or William Forsythe or folk dance or even of a contemporary art opening. A third temperament inspires itself from narrative, telling movement, or “un-story”, stories  – Tanztheater, think Pina Bausch, think even of playwright Nathalie Béasse, think about those spectators who ache with the pleasure of deciding what all that wonderful kerfuffle on stage means.

Keeping in mind that a temperament always thoroughly mixes and matches a particular inspiration with other inspirations, all three of the inspirations I’ve identified articulate more or less around what you might call the “Merce Cunningham rule”. That is, a choreographer never needs hesitate to bring other and more and differentiated technicities and perspectives to the service of dance experience: think of video projection at the opera. Finally, since the choreographic instinct is to bring the audience somewhere, however-articulated, a temperament will always figure in some notion of the “sacred” as a goal, process, or result in a dance performance. Look for it.

Three dance-performances in dance critical language

The three performances that follow are the last I that I will ever see produced under Marie-Thérèse Allier’s spell. They represent the same temperaments and inspirations that they did forty years ago – fresh and relevant because, in the end, they let dance happen and will into the far future: Jour futur, Les cent mille derniers quarts d’heure, Débandade.

Jour futur – Thierry Micouin & Pauline Boyer: Etrange cargo 2022, La Ménagerie de Verre

"Jour futur", Thierry Micouin & Pauline Boyer. Photo © François Stemmer

Called a re-interpretation of the hypnotic and repetitive – techno-reminiscent – music developed by the 70s rock group CAN, Jour futur is pretty much a synchronized dance number with an accent on how personal expression meshes with group expression. On a gorgeous, impeccably eye-pleasing stage, four performers move over a small lagoon of white that is embanked by what looks to be heaps of black cassette tape. The back of the set, bathed with low strobe, is all blaze- reds and oranges: could be fires of near doom or of new dawn. At first, the four performers turn about the stage until they find a two-beat walk that evolves into a framework or reference point for a more individualized and elaborate dancing as the piece moves along. Surround-sound style CAN music develops in parallel but independently – sometimes dance seems to follow it, sometimes to be inspired by it, sometimes to leave it entirely aside. The dance performance seems conditioned by whatever it is the dancers as individuals are feeling within a group project – their movements shape the group synchronization, making Jour futur visually fascinating, like watching the muscles on a cat tense up to create a careful jump between windows in a long wall

Les cent mille derniers quarts d’heure - Matthieu Barbin: Etrange cargo 2022, La Ménagerie de Verre

“Les cent mille derniers quarts d’heure”, Matthieu Barbin. Photo © Matthieu Barbin

A one-man “transvestite” show, Barbin’s own body and mind are the choreography of Tanztheater rather than just conceptual topography.

Off the bat, I have to say that, though I’ve played lots of roles and put on a lot of different underclothes in pursuit of the best orgasm possible with the best of all possible partners, I’ve never understood transvestite shows – I use the Latin word because “cross-dressing” seems to me to describe my personal adventures more than what actually happens with Barbin or another. Most recently, Karine and I have agreed that “transvestites” are a unique phenomenon, like the Pythias or Holy Fools… Or something.

All that said, when Matthieu Barbin turns himself into an insaisissable Tammy Faye Baker to tell a story, I don’t have to understand transvestite shows. Barbin manages to make a dress-up and talk show into a transcendental experience. The magic localizes, at least in part, in the type of dress up. From the beginning, it is clear that this elaborately pimped-up and sprayed big blonde hair, narrow, almost body tight black sequin high-thigh split dress, heavy mascara and subtly ironic mimetic of ”womanly” contains and moves the inexpressible essence of the life-story Barbin tells in different declensions in a rough Norther working-class voice.  Les cent mille derniers comes very close to a theater piece, but in the end, I become convinced it is not necessary to understand the verbal poetry to experience the feeling and sensibility of a sister folding shirts or a near ne’er-do-well brother … . It’s enough to see them to hear them. Good show, Barbin.

Débandade - Olivia Grandville: 2021-22 season, MC93, Maison de la Culture

“Débandade”, Olivia Grandville. Photo © Marc Domage

The mixes that represent “concept” choreography were certainly present for the in-house Etrange cargo 2022 program. For instance, Charles Chemin choreographed Caroline Breton for Figures, “a study of feminist liberation that questions the body as much as its image”. Annabelle Pulcini’s ½ plié, “explor(ed) spatial relationships in light of gesture, folding and sound”. But as I don’t have time to see everything and I am more familiar with the work La Ménagerie alumna Olivia Grandville she makes a good for-instance for concept dance. And she’s all the better as she goes on easily to mixed Tanztheater with straight performances pieces such as her recent staging of her mental-biographical Klein and of her meta-historical La Guerre des pauvres.“Richness” is the operative adjective for Grandville’s textual and visual work.

For a textual instance, Grandville’s Débandade – means “stampede” but is an (unetymological) reference to bander, “get an erection”. The title turns out to be as telling about the male gender and its culture as anything more you could say. For instance, in the French-language version of The Lion King, in the crucial scene when the dad will be killed, someone shouts “C’est la débandade”. Effectively, all the anguished contradictions of personal and social panic, of falling apart, of tragedy and petty disappointment, of culture horror and transcendental liberation ye know or ye need to know right there at the outset. Just sit back and enjoy Grandville’s cod-piece parade, the sharp little man-portraits, musics, étrangétés and general good humor. Débandade is one of the most sympathetic looks at the male persuasion that you’re likely to find.

Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise [by Tracy Danison]

Raimund Hoghe’s creative search for “otherwise” is emblematic of Marie-Thérèse Allier’s contribution to the art of movement. Raimund Hoghe, “La Valse”. Photo © Rosa-Frank.com/ Courtesy Ménagerie de Verre

La Ménagerie de Verre performance studio, Laboratoire de création contemporaine – in the 11th arrondissement, just off the avenue Parmentier, about mid-way between rue de la Roquette and avenue de la République– is a legendary neighborhood institution. Until very recently it had a very human personality in Marie-Thérèse Allier, its founder and guiding spirit. That ended at the tippy end of March when Allier unexpectedly died, aged 91.

I say “unexpectedly died”, because, as with the invasion of Ukraine, despite the flagrant provocation, people of sense and sensibility just had trouble getting their heads around the very idea of her death. I was surprised myself when I heard of it – at the penultimate performance of the annual Spring program, Etrange Cargo 2022. Indeed, Le Monde newspaper reported that Allier was, quite literally, creatively engaged from her hospital room at the hour of her death – doing some last-minute consulting with staff at the opening of the day’s performance.

A dancer, not a choreographer, Marie-Thérèse Allier set up La Ménagerie as an artist’s residence and public stage for experimental creations and then kept it that way for almost forty years. Vincent Bouquet, writing in scèneweb.fr, a contemporary performance arts webzine, lists former residents whose work got a first staging at the studio and who have been both influential and popular into the present. They include, just as a sample of those you’re likely to have known earlier or heard about today, Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé, Daniel Larrieu and Angelin Preljocaj, Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Leroy, Mathilde Monnier, Christian Rizzo, Olivia Grandville, François Chaignaud, Rodrigo Garcia, Yves-Noël Genod, Vincent Macaigne and Théo Mercier.

But identifying Allier with her successful institution or her commitment to supporting successful creative contemporary dance-performance doesn’t represent her full story. More than commitment and practical ability, Allier had an instinct for dance performance that meant that she brought spectators toward what is intriguing in dance and performance. Not new, not experimental, intriguing.

From my experience as a spectator over the years, writing about dance or not, Allier seems always to have encouraged her creators to get at spectator imaginations, encouraged them to try for a sense of something that isn’t tied either to convention or radicality or originality. I look over those in the scèneweb.fr list and, among those I have experienced personally, it seems to me that that effort at something intriguing in dance is what characterizes them. Throughout Allier’s career getting at something intriguing often meant cherishing “queerness”, the only operative way, especially into the 2000s, to get a bit beyond the notions of convention, radicality and originality and all that guff.

So, at Marie-Thérèse Allier’s La Ménagerie, whether or not I liked or appreciated a piece, whether it connected with me or not, I mostly felt it managed to redeem itself in pointing me toward what I cannot or could not see or say. Emblematic of my feeling, I’m thinking now of Raimund Hoghe, who died in May 2021. Hoghe was a long-time Allier familiar, a Pina Bausch Tanztheater alumni and a wonderful dance-performance creator that I might not have even begun to understand were it not for the patience of a more perspicacious friend.

La Ménagerie’s An evening with Raimund Hoghe, Hommage à Raimund Hoghe par ses danseurs et proches collaborateurs says it all about Allier’s real contribution. Sitting there grumpily and trying to find fault, I managed not only to recognize Hoghe’s work style and manner as each of the dancers and collaborators involved honored a remarkable fellow in their movement. They brought me to feel, as a spectator, that I’d shared in the man’s essential sensibility and feeling. I first slipped into Hoghe’s perspective and then, tripped into a place where I could imagine myself not just as beyond words but as otherwise. Choosing and supporting creators willing and trying to do that, why that’s a real contribution.

So, thanks, Marie-Thérèse Allier, for enabling Raimund Hoghe and all those others, who, as Hoghe did, seek dance otherwise.

Marie Desoubeaux has a knack for conjuring music and teasing movement [by Tracy Danison]

Sound from music. From sax to rain. “Après tout”, Marie Desoubeaux. Photo © Mireille Huguet

My downstairs neighbor, who is of a thrifty persuasion, very often makes his little sprites oatmeal for breakfast – I’ve seen the battered tin pot on his stove, dried-up oatmeal stuck on it. I know when he’s making the stuff – he calls it "porridge" – because our walls are pretty acoustical and he has a peculiar way of tap-scraping the pot in order to knock the last batch of dried-up oatmeal into the new batch: tap-tap-skrishhh.

Hearing that tap-tap-skrishhh sound wakes up a lot of feeling, in me, in the sprites, too, probably in their mother, still abed, probably in her thrifty husband.

As the neighbor stirs the oats, mood, experience and image bubble thick in all the brains around.

My brain, the sprites’ brains, probably the neighbor’s brain, make the sound of oatmeal a soundtrack of our personal movies.

I tell myself tap-tap-skrishhh is wake-up music, but it’s not music.

It’s just sound that associates to movement and feeling.

To become music, tap-tap-skrishhh needs a conjuror to grok the right pattern and choose the appropriate tools to weave that pattern with:

tap-tap-skrishhh, skrishhh, skrishhh, tap, Tap-tap a-skrishhh, skrishhh, a skrishhh, tap, skrishhh…

Along with, say, a hollow stick, plus, say, some lungs to rhythm the passage of air through the hollow of the stick.

Conjuring music is, obviously, no mean feat.

But conjuring music while teasing movement into dance seems to me not only a great feat but almost and impossible one, like building a large hadron collider or binding petroleum jelly and heavy water.

There are a few music conjurors who are also movement teasers, but not many, which makes them notable.

I’m thinking about sound and dance, conjuring music and teasing movement because, three years ago now, at Regard du Cygne, I was so struck by how naturally, artfully, powerfully, choreographer Marie Desoubeaux had bound together sound and movement  in making RESTER (“Remain”), as far as I know, her first dance performance creation.

I walked out thinking RESTER was not a one-shot, not a happy accident, but that Desoubeaux had that rare knack for twining both essential arts so closely together they seemed one thing. My judgment, I thought, was certainly helped along by the art and power of dancer Margaux Amoros musician Robin Pharo.

All the same, I felt it was the “naturalness” of the apparent unity of music and dance in RESTER that upheld my judgment.

Music from sound. Set, “Après tout”, Marie Desoubeaux. Photo © Mireille Huguet“

I finally saw a second Desoubeaux creation,  Après tout, (“After All”) on 22 March 2022, at Théâtre de Vanves. I feel vindicated: Desoubeaux does have a natural when it comes to putting together sound and movement.

Après tout is very different to RESTER.

Where RESTER is almost purely music and movement in twilight and seen from hard benches, Après tout is almost theater.

Set in an elaborately visual pink-quartz quarry and seen from upholstered seats, Après tout has a story line and an up-to-date topic: it brings out the brief lives of its three very active performers in light of Earth abiding.

In Après tout, Desoubeaux shows, too, that she is deft with the dramatic implications of story-line, visuals and sounds – the pink quartz quarry, sound choices and characterizations work; she knows how to transform spectators into participants.

But these things show Desoubeaux is a capable movement creator, like many others. What interests me, and should interest potential spectators, is what continues to set her apart. And what sets her apart is, as I’ve said, a knack for binding sound to movement.

This knack, talent, shines through in Après tout (which Desoubeaux's notes describe as “a musical and choreographic creation”). The knack, talent, is what struck me hard in RESTER (which her notes describe as “a solo in two voices for a dancer and gambist (viol player)”):  a capacity to bind two distinct arts so that they seem just one, a knack for conjuring music while simultaneously teasing movement into dance.

Put Marie Desoubeaux on your Paris dance experience bucket list.

Come unto Dance, worshippers of true Spring: June Events 2022 [by Tracy Danison]

Evening in the dance quarter at the Cartoucherie arts complex, Bois de Vincennes, Paris. Photo © Patrick Berger

HERE'S ANOTHER THING for the Paris dance-performance experience bucket list.

It’s true I wrote hopefully about Spring not long ago, in an essay about that wonderful flamenco dancer Paula Comitre.

But in that essay I meant “Spring” in the moral, allegorical or metaphorical sense and pertaining to Comitre’s refreshing talent.

Since it’s now possible to actually enjoy a Paris Spring again. I would like to bubble about, as Karine calls it, true Spring – about running sap, shoots, buds, lilies and iris, all, all unburdened of frost; about robin redbreasts and hapless worms, barking dogs and rollicking brats – about all the real things behind those figures.

It’s cold in my apartment, but too warm for the furnace to kick in automatically. Outside my window, a slate-grey sky jets down freezing rain. A brave magpie dogfights a raven as big as a chicken.

Yes. But here, inside, I’ve turned on the heat. On my table, I have the advance dance-performance program for the Atelier de Paris’ annual June Events festival. It’s back!

June Events 2022 features mostly work I haven’t yet seen by creators whose quality I already know.

Pieces range from solos to eight-performer extravaganza. They type largely across the movement arts, from performance to performance-dance to dance. These find their places in the big theater, the studio, the Bois de Vincennes and the Marais. There’s a global, Europe, and France contemporary culture dimension to it, too.

Daniel Linehan, US born, working from Belgium, Listen Here: these woods, Listen Here: this cavern; Christos Papadoulos, Larsen C; Ann Van den Broek, Joy, enjoy; Vania Vaneau, Nebula; Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Cherche forêt; Smaïl Kanoute, Yasuke Kurosan; Joanne Leighton, Corps exquis; Catherine Gaudet, L’Affadissement du merveilleux; Mathilde Rance, Black bird.  

For the rest, I can trust the eye and ear of the Atelier’s artistic direction – if I don’t always like what I experience there, I do quite definitely always experience it.

The name “June Events” always tickles me. I like being – theoretically, metaphorically, allegorically, mind – tickled. It’s not the historical allusion to the famous Journées de Juin workers revolt of 1848 that brings the true theoretically-metaphorically tickled smile to my lips, though, even if I do like a good historically-distant worker’s revolt.

It’s the dates of the festival that actually move me: 30 May to 18 June 2022.

Barring some meteorological equivalent of a surprise barbarian invasion by a wacky fascist with a testosterone-poisoning issue, the weather’s likely to be bearable if it isn’t absolutely splendid on those dates. And splendid weather always augurs well for a good time, whatever the dance performance on offer.

There are few places where you can so casually and pleasantly experience dance and performance as you can in the Atelier’s share of the Cartoucherie, just behind the Parc Floral de Paris, just up the avenue from the newly renovated Château de Vincennes.

I can easily ride my bike from Panthéon to the Cartoucherie and environs in 30 minutes. If I have time, I can walk and look at the plantations in the flower park or walk around and have a good look at things along the paths of the Bois, some of which are still unexpected after all this time. On the grounds of the Cartoucherie itself, in the lingering afternoons and evenings, the lawns and trees are soft green, not too tended. I – and you, too! – can most always get a drink or food before or after performances or lop around in the grass with a picnic.

See you there.

No rivalry here: Fabrice Ramalingom dances the heart of a guy [by Tracy Danison]

Hugues Rondepierre, 23, Jean Rochereau, 78. Test. Photo © Brice Pelleschi

PUT ANY ONE OF FABRICE RAMALINGOM'S PIECES on your bucket list of to-see Paris dance-performances. You’re bound to experience something both absorbing and creatively finished.

At the end of a performance of Une singulière histoire de la danse, Fabrice Ramalingom’s danced biography, I was muttering encyclical-like to myself that “the human person is a mass of figures”.

I was thinking of figures as discrete postures of body and mind to which one usually attaches one or multiple words. For instance, the figure of two people clenching: “couple”, “fighting” or “loving”, among many other possible opposites and apposites.

As to the mass in the “mass of figures”. When I see a fellow human or, indeed, when I see myself, what I see is the mass of figures acquired through time and accident. The figures pulse and shift upon the unknowable shape of the wordless heart that we both call “you”.

And as to Fabrice Ramalingom’s work, I think this figures-on-wordless-heart schema explains at least approximately how his choreography succeeds as capital D Dance. The schema also explains why the man sitting next to me during Générations, the choreographer’s most recent dance performance piece, took a moment to paw the air with hands and eyes before pulling out “bienveillant” to characterize the piece:

     A.− MORAL. [La bienveillance as a virtue or as behavior]:

1. [Francis] Hutcheson (1694-1746) writes that the essence of virtue in the soul is bienveillance... He defines it thus: “A feeling that leads you to desire your neighbor’s well-being”. . . [the post-Revolutionary philosopher and statesman Hegelian historian Victor] Cousin [1792- 1867], Cours d'hist. de la philos. mod., t. 4, 1847, pp. 149-150. – Dictionnaire : LLF .

Also, the schema explains why bienveillant sticks in my head, and why there were so many stung, sparkly-eyed faces among the spectators, including my own. Générations was a relief for me – like my neighbor also said, there is “no eroticism” in it. Let’s tell the truth: fear of accidental eroticism in my inter-male friendships makes me stiffer than actual desire ever will. I don’t think I’m alone.

Basically, Ramalingom evokes all this feeling by artfully reducing and arranging the number and impact of figures on the heart. The spectator can better perceive then experience the pulse and shifts of the person. In short, a body can empathize and from empathy, feel what they can’t see or say.

Jean Rochereau, Hugues Rondepierre. Don't look at the nails. Photo © Brice Pelleschi

GENERATIONS TURNS AROUND A PAIRING of Jean Rochereau and Hugues Rondepierre, respectively, a 78 year old man and a 23 year old man. From the git-go, and with the most apparently inconsequential opening, Ramalingom’s art – the noos in the stage and people set up, the discrete sets of figures, the sequencing of the spectator experience of the latter, the pace of movement and sound-scape  –  first make it plain, for instance, that age really is relative; for instance, that pater-linearity is just another possible inter-persons positioning among others; that the words (and with them, the emotions) we attach to them are not of some necessity adequate, inadequate or  à propos to the figures we’ve so heavily farded our shapeshifting persons with.

Within Ramalingom’s framing, Rochereau and Rondepierre, pared down to the pulsing and shifts that is themselves, are in strong and sustained physical contact, what my mother used to say was horseplay and my father, wrasslin. They grapple, roll about, butt, laugh and wail.

As I watch, the word that comes to my mind is “rivalry”.

The word, there, experiencing Ramalingom’s choreography, with Karine and strangers and acquaintances about me, seems … shocking … It has that strangeness, but not quite, that words sometimes get during psychoanalysis.

Man and boy, traveler, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy! In such a wide world, where did I fall in love with this word “rivalry” and its slutty emotion?

After all, as a kid, I had a lot to do with country folk and our chattel species, barefoot yahoos with a straw between the teeth and slop-bellied sheriffs and, especially, horses, cows, chickens, sheep, cats and dogs, foxes, bats and mice, daddy long-legs, crickets and snakes. A lot of words come to mind among the figures that remain. But “rivalry” is very far from a striking one. It’s much too strong to describe any interpersonal relations I ever had …

I think, if horses mostly just “horse around” – standin’ close to each other, browsin’, digestin’, twitchin’ & swishin’ flies – humans then must mostly “human around”. And humaning is exactly what Ramalingom has Hugues Rondepierre and Jean Rochereau doing:  a bit of wrasslin’, givin’, ignorin’ and foolin’ with little presents and bein’ (as birds), until they and spectators with them are there where we all really are when the playactin’ is stripped away.

Finally, in his way, Ramalingom’s choreography serves up a visible heart. It’s interesting. It’s moving. And, as my neighbor said, well, it’s bienveillant.

I saw Générations – Battle of Portrait at its premiere 12 March 2022 at Atelier de Paris CDCN, Performers were Fabrice Ramalingom, Hugues Rondepierre and Jean Rochereau. Atelier de Paris CDCN was the principal supporter for the creation and production of the piece. While at 23, Hugues Rondepierre is still at the debut of his career, Fabrice Ramalingom and Jean Rochereau have deep historic roots in contemporary dance, in France, especially, as performers, choreographers, transmitters and developers. Une singulière histoire de la danse by Fabrice Ramalingom was produced by Studio Regard du Cygne as part of the Belleville venue’s annual Signes de Printemps program.

Performer Simon Tanguy does words well [by Tracy Danison]

Simon Tanguy performing “Inging”. Photo©Elian Bachini

Although she disdained mostly everybody but her two sisters and her boon girlfriend Dottie, my mother was much involved in good works. Ma mastered the trick of feeding the hungry, comforting the sick and clothing the naked while quite literally holding her nose. Also, she had a natural talent for mimicry. To show her disgust of talkative people, for instance, she would open her mouth wide, wetly blubber “blahblahblah” and roll her hands from her face outward and toward the floor, simulating the trajectory of spurting word-vomit.

I bring the matter up because of performer Simon Tanguy’s deft insertion of a similarly excellent wet blabber at exactly the right moment with exactly the right gesture during his performance based on choreographer Jeanine Durning’s Inging at Regard du Cygne the other day. Ma was a fine natural mimic, but Simon Tanguy, having studied matters a bit, is much better, if, perhaps, less terrifying for children.

The title “Inging” is a reference to certain signifying qualities of the “progressive and continuous” ing suffix. In Tanguy’s take on “Inging” he suggests that the enemy is not a signifying quality or even a chatty neighbor but words themselves: De do do do de da da da …

Tanguy’s performance also suggests that the danger of too many words is not, as it probably was for my mother, intimacy, but exhaustion that leaves you vulnerable. The logic of ‘em, Sting sings, ties you up and rapes you, sure, but Tanguy’s performance suggests to me that the trauma and exhaustion leave you lost to yourself in the fake reality of the The Word. That’s worse: Mirabile dictu! That wine is truly blood; Don’t peek, there’s nobody behind the curtain; Nothing to see here; Donald Trump is the Messiah; Jew Zelensky is a Nazi; Those bombs on Kharkov are good bombs! And so forth, go those lost in The Word.

Tanguy’s performance makes of words a broad, impossibly damp, burlap sack. The sack has once carried some putrid, vaguely foreign, vegetable. After a little tickling flattery (using shared references) to let us know we are the right sort of people and a set up that teaches spectators to twist and turn in our seats to follow him with eyes and bodies, in a mere 45 minutes Tanguy gently has descended that sack, drowned the spirit in damp and scratchy discomfort.

Two details of Tanguy’s set, both somehow as absurd as sinister, stick in my mind, seem to me to demonstrate how his Inging works through a subtle destabilization of perception and sense. A little camera, just on the verge of audience awareness, apparently films Tanguy as he blahblahblahs at his desk. But the image is nowhere projected, ‘though, on the wall to the right, also just on the verge of awareness, are three silent earnest looping, looping, looping, talking, talking, talking heads talking with easy passion. Can Tanguy be filming himself just for filming? Can he be doing it for some secret reason? What’s the sense in it? Why is it not quite out of sight? As for the silently earnest looping talking heads, I come eventually to understand these are historical, perhaps, deep, Tanguys not Tanguys live. What’s the sense in it? Is it weird vanity. A marker for something else? Why is it just about unreadable?

Once, I notice “Ing Projection” flash beneath the earnest talking Tanguys. I laugh to myself because that seems so, what? Corporate, – marketing? Now, – selfie-ing? It comes into my mind that the absurdity of commercial manipulation and personal narcissism likely hides the sinister fact that my attention is continuously being engaged by this video stuff –  exhausting my ability to engage, exhausting me.

So. Tanguy’s Inging is more like participating in Kundalini dancing than vegging out with West Side Story. Tanguy’s showing and not telling; he’s full of sensibility but leaving me to feel.

It is no fun – it is not That’s Entertainment! – it’s not edifying – it is no TED Talk. But it sure is interesting.

It’s interesting because taken all together Tanguy’s performance leaves room enough for my own and his experience.  There’s a place for my strong personal guilt and embarrassment for de-do-do-do-ing my students that very day. There’s place for my appreciation for Tanguy’s insight, performance talent and stagecraft and room enough for the unique experience of the performance itself: I’m sitting here several days later imagining still a world with less of The Word in it.

Simon Tanguy’s production of Inging was presented 18 March 2022 at Studio Le Regard du Cygne as part of the studio’s annual Signes de Printemps program. Simon Tanguy, originally trained as a clown, has performed with a wide variety of choreographers, including Boris Charmatz and Maud Le Plaudec. He has his own troupe, cie Propagande C. Choreographer Jeanine Durning is currently active in the U.S.; in addition to inging, Durning’s pieces include: Dark Matters; This Shape, We Are In; and To Being.

Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal [by Tracy Danison]

In a key of turbulence. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © C. Raynaud de Lage

There are things that really should appear on the New York Times Letters page.

When a letter gets in the Times Letters page, why, it gets read by Letters page readers, those guys and girls who linger a bit over morning coffee before making the world.  

I once wrote a letter to the Letters page. I criticized Singapore’s then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yu’s hare-brained “Asian Values” campaign. The Times Letters page folks have the noos to know when a should-publish looks ‘em straight in the eye; events proved that my writing to them was the right thing.

Ye shall know them by their works, sayeth the prophet.

Stung by my words, the faux philosophe of Singapore thundered an unseemly and intemperate reply to the Times, also dispatching a copy of it to my student address at the University of Buffalo.

Are you listening, Times Letters page?

Here’s another should-publish.

Angers, France, -based playwright Nathalie Béasse has won the “Beyond Words Values” award “for cultivating insight into the dynamics of human perception and un-story in theater performance”. The “Beyond Words Values” award means that Nathalie Béasse is in the vanguard in shaping up a theatrical lineage to go along with a less Word-centered world.

It’s a big deal.

As a poet, I’ve always been suspicious of the Word – it is hard to work with, not accurate as to actual experience and is dangerously hypnotic for user and hearer alike. For instance, the flattening urban space in and outside of Kharkov, Ukraine, certainly suggests that material destruction and living misery go well beyond what can be said of them – the dangerous hypnotism that preceded it goes without saying. And, if nothing else, those burnt out Russian tanks from the sixth Battle of Kharkov show that humanity has got itself tangled into a pretty desperate story loop this past century and more.  

I welcome any creative endeavor that diminishes the power of the Word. It is not for nothing that Hell is described as the kingdom of noise: turning down the volume makes for instant relief.  Anything that even slightly lowers the buzz and pop of the Word exponentially increases the power of sympathy, sensibility and imagination.

Béasse’s approach to theater does that, vitiates the hectoring Word, increases the power of sympathy, sensibility and imagination. For me, her approach has a lot in common with “capital D” Dance: stressing feeling over narrative, mutual experience over moralizing or exegesis, respecting the physics of perception over imposing dramatics.

 

In a social key. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © Jérôme Blin

So, as she might shape plastics and metals to open spectator perceptions onto the color, shade and texture of a thing, Béasse, who began her creative career as a visual/material artist, in her plays shapes relations among human beings into positions of entry onto an “un-story” (that is, into a visualized flow of feeling, emotion and mood) that she massages into a stage chronology (that simulates diverse logics among events and perceptions).

Laughter seems the most expressed audience reaction to Béasse’s theater; folks laugh as they first recognize and then identify into situations, then join themselves to the sensibilities stimulated and projected by the performers, then “participate” in the feeling, emotion and mood that is the un-story.

In a key of together. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © Jérôme Blin

For instance, in Béasse’s most recent work, Ceux qui vont contre le vent (something like, “Moving against the wind”), stage chronology rolls out as, approximately, moving in a group, group sloshing around a table, person declaring, persons & groups evolving and settling into. These “ings”– moving, sloshing, declaring, evolving, settling into, call them “visualized riffs” – sound to me like, and works on the spectators like, the conceptual barebones of a choreography, pointing the shapes of feeling, emotion and mood within, acting as indicators of a wider, mutual experience of ‘moving against the wind’.

People laugh as the “ings” roll into focus and take their place in the chronology.

They become more sober as performers introduce different “keys” of relational tension within the ings. Rather than happen on a high-low scale, the keys range all over a flat map of spectator perception of the ings: the relational tensions of “win the lottery” is as possible, as “win at solitaire”, as “go to bed”, as “come out” or “lose an argument” or “learn product not in stock” or as “divorce”. The result is enriched spectator perception.

The accumulation of ings and, within them, the accumulation of a slew of possible keys of relational tensions shape into a concerto of personalizing experience: spectators become participants. Participants in the process become (as far as the physics of perception allow) experiencers. “Experiencers”, I mean, as in those engaged by Capital D Dance, as opposed to, say, audience members making a (an interior) commentary on,         or a (renewed or recreated or extension of) narrative about, or   having catharsis from, or observing the denouement of, or silently pointing towards a story.

An Experiencer in Béasse’s theater, is, as for the experiencer in Capital D Dance, the story, is what I call the un-story. To be the un-story, even for a second, is to be oneself the power to Imagine or not a new story or no story at all, the state where a person can snatch something new from the universal ether. In other words, in a state of un-story, you can get out of Kharkov narrative loop once and for all… or at least start recognizing that it could be different.

… Anyhow, Nathalie Béasse does a fascinating, entirely different kind of theater. Times Letter page readers should treat themselves to a live performance. Once they've done, they will come to dig, admire and imitate Béasse’s “Beyond Words Values” as I do.  

That's a big deal.

Stepping through that door: "An Immigrant’s Story" by Wanjiru Kamuyu [by Tracy Danison]

Nelly Celerine signifying doubly in "An Immigrant's Story" by Wanjiru Kamyuyu. Photo©Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

I’ve never mentioned the very kind and excellent teachers I have had – especially including the SUNY-Buffalo teaching assistant who gave me Adrienne Rich’s 1962 Prospective Immigrants Please Note in 1976.

Prospective Immigrants is a manual of human physics, a starting perception for my long-long unfinished grapple toward self-liberation –

Either you will/go through this door/or you will not go through

If you go through/there is always the risk/of remembering your name.

–  … That would be my realization that when, back in 1959, Great Grandma Steinmetz pleaded with us to push away the 10-foot tall, one-ton oak armoire looming over the bed where she lay dying, she was neither imagining sad things nor whining unwomanly.  

The scene is literary, Sherwood-Anderson ghoulish and amusing. It seems doing a small thing in a great world to take a poor old dying lady's fears seriously, yes? All the same, thanks to Adrienne Rich, I know this perplexing dream-memory of a toddler is a primal step toward my self-liberation. I’ve even come to see that tolerance is fraud and only the sincerest pricks talk of charity. Nowadays, if you ask me to lift a dead rhinoceros off your back, I swear, I’ll try, I'll gladly heave hard as ever I can, gratis, no questions asked, no thanks necessary.

Things look at you doubly/and you must look back/and let them happen.

Imagine my pleasure to see my human physics manual made into – Almighty Christ! What else could it be made into, a serious poem like Prospective Immigrants? – a dance performance called An Immigrant’s Story.

Created and performed by the very thoughtful Kenyan & American Wanjiru Kamuyu, An Immigrant’s Story premiered at the newly inaugurated Musée de l’Immigration at Porte Dorée last year. It was then taken up by the annual Faits d’Hiver dance-performance festival. I saw it at Espace 1789, an excellent (and successful) multimedia venue in the near-Paris suburb of St. Ouen.

When I told Wanjiru Kamuyu about Rich’s poem during the meet-and-greet in the bar after the performance, she made it clear to me that her manual of human physics has developed independent of the dead Canadian poet. It's comforting to understand that Rich's lines exist without her, not only in my head, but in the ether I share with beautiful strangers. Kamuyu said she'd read it.

Thinking it over, I guess I shall take Wanjiru Kamuyu’s choreographic meter & foot as a sort of Large Hadron Collider for Truth & Beauty that proves with a new energy in a new rig what was before, for me, but the occasional and accidental symmetry of immortal hand and eye. I mean, An Immigrant's Story makes Prospective Immigrants be.

More than symmetry. Nelly Celerine, dance performer, left, on stage with choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu. Photo© Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

Kamuyu was born in Kenya to an American mother who was there, no doubt, to aim toward self-liberation. When mother moved to Detroit, no doubt still aiming herself towards self-liberation, Wanjiru of course moved with her. She was a young teen.

Kamuyu now lives and works in France.

In Detroit, Kamuyu found a queerly-cracked looking glass to pair with the one she’d brought from Kenya, which certainly spurred Story’s development but, in my take, certainly did not finish it – like Rich’s work, there are many little expanding ideas swelling inside.

It was surprising and pleasant to find a savor of musical comedy in Kamuyu’s contemporary dance performance take on Rich’s rather disorienting precepts, precepts which I had for so long associated with the earnest flöt bread of an American poet’s circle circa 1980.

An Immigrant’s Story is a two-strong woman show: Kamuyu, projecting a strong friendly lucidity and intellectual gravity and Nelly Celerine, independent dancer, singer and teacher, a natural anchor and attracting presence.

Celerine and Kamuyu are not a duo. They are a double play.

Story opens with Kamuyu lightly stage left, Celerine stage right front. Ostensibly to interpret Kamuyu’s dance in sign (LSF), the moment she Celerine her expressing hands, her interpretation becomes a full-blown story – twin, with Kamyuyu’s. As the twin grows strong other stories and potential stories and possible stories emerge in me. This one, for instance, and the others I am keeping for my own.

Sounds that split into two twin rhythms parallel Kamuyu’s voyage from Africa to America. Celerine’s signing self-choreographs into an upper body or aerial energy that swings over and under her presence: imagine an atom with a single electron. Hydrogen? Primary, light, rich and explosive. Right?

As Kamuyu’s and Celerine’s movement shapes, it binds them together in a thickening band of energy. This energy resolves into an orbit; the orbit resolves into a slow-moving cyclone; the cyclone resolves into an eye; the eye resolves into a looking glass.

When I look into the looking-glass eye, I can hear fat drops of rain and the roll of thunder beside a buzzing of bees and a languor of mid-summer.

I was afraid to ask my neighbor what they heard.

But the important thing is that, as far as I can tell, Wanjiru Kamuyu’s dance proves, as Rich’s poetry posited, as my manual of human physics suggests, that, yes, in human physics, be is the finale of seem.

A Spring for our time: “Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas)” by Paula Comitre [by Tracy Danison]

Paula Comitre and Lorena Nogal figuring a Spring "Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas)". Photo©Ivan Alcazar

Sat straight back, in shirtsleeves, hands on knees on the edge of a seat crowded with my winter rig: duvet jacket, hoodie, scarf. The whole of my attention is on the elegant and joyful riot of Paula Comitre’s duo, Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas).

Then I sense Spring.

Like dear old Mole in Wind in the Willows, sudden joy splutters up my spine.

Attention broken, I sniff the air, glance eyes only slowly from side to side – Rattie? Toad? Badger?

There’s an unknown perfume to the air, a strange blur to the light.

Not Spring, but a Spring.

A Spring of buds, not blooms. One of questioning over expectation.

Thunder in a clear sky, ripples in a still pond.

Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas), “Parable (The map’s edge)”, is just this – excited Mole feeling along the seams and textures of the huge black polyurethane tarp that is thrown over time to come, scrabbling at its intriguing shapes and contours … trying hard to descry time’s always-near country. By the complex operation of quantum mechanics on human physics, the tarp is the same my parents used to cover the tomato starts down at the farm.

And just so, in just such an intense, searching groove, Paula Comitre and partner Lorena Nogal tune and twist their Flamenco to channeling, spirit and sex and appropriately, pretty much the entire repertory of modern, classic and contemporary dance.

Comitre and Nogal power-skip over every millimeter of that obscure tarp. They call in Spain’s clichés. Sancho Panza – Look! That woman with her hair-pulled back hard enough to hurt is mumming a bull! There! Ferdinand the Bull: old sour pusses in mantillas, fat men with wens sweating as the toreador draws blood, tight black flaring bell-skirts… They foot stomp! They ignite booming and rattling drums and clashes of cymbal, careen through stage mechanicals, figure under savvy lighting. They get in behind curtains, tear them down, wear them. They wind up like gorgeous cobras thrilling as whiskey-voiced hidalgos caterwaul to peripatetic guitar plunkers. My smiling eyes taste imperial brocade, insatiable women of iron, desire so tight none’s ever got in…

It’s too much and so much that it’s just perfect. That’s talent, I reckon. I hope she keeps it up, especially the dance channeling.

The people around me, who look like they know a lot more about every damn little thing than I ever will, they think she’s perfect, too. They slap their hands together and some even cry Olé! For them, none of this searching and skipping has landed amiss, nothing has fallen astray. For them, Paula Comitre’s Pure Flamenco. OK.

As for me, squinty old Mole carried away in a Spring, I’m thinking it’s Paula Comitre, 27, and her whole generation might be under that old black tarp. As a vision, it sure beats bare-chested Vladimir Putin riding a hypersonic missile.

Alegorias (El limite y sus mapas) is Paula Comitre’s first collaborative performance. At the Chaillot Flamenco Biennale 2022 presentation, the troupe included Lorena Nogal (dance and co-writing), Juan Campallo, (guitarist), Rafael Moises Heredia (percussionist) and Tomas de Perrate (singer).  Alegorias follows a solo, Cámara abierta, “Open room”, a solo, presented to acclaim in 2020.

Studio Regard du Cygne at a glance: contemporary dance and performance "just a little underground" [by Tracy Danison]

Jessica Bonamy and her Cie Safra explore choreography as silent language. A diversity of intention in dance-performance is the most striking characteristic of Regard du Cygne’s programming.  Photo©2021 Rachel Krief

I think the last dance performanceI saw – or, at least, the one that touched me most, personally – before shuffling off through a two-year health emergency and into a 2022 at the brink of a European war for lost empire was Amy Swanson’s Ma Robe (“My Gown”) at the studio Regard du Cygne, in Belleville, in Paris’ 20^th arrondissement.

As I recall, the show was fun and I felt good afterwards. There was in it the immediate enthusiasm of the kids next to me for that great heavy satin gown twirling that gave new depth of sincerity to their squeaky j’adores, a remembrance of Karine’s love for “a skirt that twirls”, a thought that for Isadora Duncan dance was a link to a truer (or: ancient-er) religion, a thought that both Buddhist “forest” monks and Sufi devotees twirl themselves into altered consciousness.

I thought then that dance is probably about that, altering consciousness, like one can with peyote or something 60s like that. Since then, I’ve come to think that Dance, capital “D”, is about entering the state of Imagination, capital “I”. The mark of that is feeling good after a performance.

Regard du Cygne –  now with nearly 40 years of intentions and choreographers and dance-performances layered into it, reopened post-pandemic this past Fall – putting together and producing its annual Signes d’Automne program.

At the little studio, a piece may leave me hot or cold or puzzled, but it always feels right: there’s a will to open to Dance, however it forms itself in the minds of its latest movers and shapers and, also, give young ideas a shot. Plus, dance lessons, kid-shows, family days, short films and conferences. I've put in links to the artists in the latest program, Signes de Printemps, posted below, which will give an idea of the diversity of performance intention involved.

Christina Towle, Regard du Cygne’s artistic director, says of the autumn re-opening that even when things were “rock and roll” – stressful – it was just “beautiful”. She cites the spontaneous enjoyment of the family day, especially strong performances, such as choreographer-dancer Rebecca Journo’s one-woman L’Epouse (“The Bride”) or un-reproduceably fine creative moments such as composer-pianist-choreographer Aurélien Richard’s Impromptus.

The stress, Towle says, came from Covid-related filling and backfilling of a program that the studio strives to keep “a little underground”: emerging choreographers, and “people who aren’t yet on everybody’s playlist”. Regard du Cygne, along with the association Mains d’Oeuvres in the near-suburb of Saint Ouen, she says, remains one of the few dance-performance studios that will run unknowns.

Contemporary dance production tends to be open to evolution anyway, Towle says, and a lot of the studio’s programming is works-in-progress. What with the shutdowns, lockdowns, cancellations and plain old time between creation and production, “three or four projects had transformed into something else entirely.”

 

“Prouesse de l echec” (Wonders of failure). Performances at Regard du Cygne may be new creations or works in progress... Photo©2021 Benoit Chapon

What keeps drawing people to the studio after 40 years? What’s special to the Regard du Cygne? I ask her. She tells me that it is the studio’s traditional charm in the tradition of Belleville.  

That rings true. It also occurs to me that the traditional charm protects Regard du Cygne’s quite radically contemporary universalist project.

Just at the corner of the rues Belleville and Pixérécourt, the studio, is plunk in the middle of Belleville, now a densely-populated neighborhood enjoying a deep-rooted mix of contrasting cultures and traditions living very different types of lives cheek-to-buttock in architecturally undistinguished residences. The Bellevillois crowd their streets and parks. They seem mostly to keep within that bubble of coolly polite modesty that characterizes so many respectable middling-broke citizens in this country. Businesses tend to small and family-run. With sérieux, and the living-day long, people work with a particular attention to a certain good humor and personal dignity. Candide would be comfortable and well-liked here.

When I contemplate it in the round, at the heart of Belleville is a respect for figuring it out how to get a life done – la débrouillardise.

Regard du Cygne shares this basic form of respect – such basic respect too often lacks in the marketing-culture of our Oomph-capitalist era. Its sérieux when it comes to getting dance creation out before its public along with the good humor and dignity of its welcome, explain the longevity of its endeavor.  

If you’re looking for a place where you can see what’s emerging in dance and performance as well as enjoy a bit of Paris that is, as Mia Doi Todd puts it, far from the Eiffel Tower … where you can be your skin and bones, the Regard du Cygne is for you.

Program Signes de Printemps 2022, Regard du Cygne

A "Pile ou Frasq" open-stage performance. Photo©Bernard Bousquet

Fri 4 March 16:00 Public rehearsal, Glissement, Johan Bichot

Sat 5 March 20:00 Shared stage: r e s t e r [boomerang versio], Marie Desoubeaux, cie Présomptions de Présences, dance performance with music; and Spin Tuner & Field Scores Maya M. Carroll & Roy Carroll, cie Présomptions de Présences, dance performance with music

Tues 8 March 20:00 Amaan Julie Métairie, cie Trans’Art, an electro-tale, performance-dance-music (storytelling)

Weds 9 March 20:00 Amaan Julie Métairie, cie Trans’Art, an electro-tale, performance-dance-music (storytelling)

Thurs 10 March 10:00 & 14:00  Dance and performance tales for kids

Fri 11 March 16:00 & 20:00  Dance and performance WIP

Mon 14 March 19:00 In association with Le Générateur performance program Pile ou Frasq: Open stage: amateur performance in 10 minutes or less

Tues 15 March 20:00 With performance program Pile ou Frasq: Multidisciplinary performances at Le Générateur performance space (Gentilly)

Thurs 17 March  20:00  Shared stage: Inizio, dance creation, Francesca Ziviani / Inging, happening-performance creation, Jeanine Durning  & Simon Tanguy

Fri 18 March 20:00 20:00  Shared stage: Inizio, dance creation, Francesca Ziviani / Inging, happening-performance creation, Jeanine Durning  & Simon Tanguy

Thurs 24 March 20:00  BROUHAHA 2,  Lola Maury: dance, performance, music and ritual

Fri 25 March 20:00  BROUHAHA 2,  Lola Maury: dance, performance, music and ritual

Tues 29 March 20:00  Une singulière histoire de la danse, danced lecture by Fabrice Ramalingom

Weds 30 March 16:00  00  Une singulière histoire de la danse, danced lecture by Fabrice Ramalingom

Sat 02 April Family Day by Sylvie Le Quéré: Dance performance fun for kids

                     10:00 > 11:30  Zool (Performance & workshop)

                     15:00 > 16:30  Zool (Performance & workshop)

Cognition, perception & whatever works, works in painting, poetics and dance [by Tracy Danison]

Like Dance, capital “D”, Kiefer’s show is a “whole” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. That includes Grand Palais Ephémère, an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère©Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

Karine & I were delighted when we saw that the Grand Palais was holding an exposition called ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan”. A pandemic wet dream. Great visual art plus enough space to keep any virus concentrations in the air very low.

Kiefer honors the work of the remarkable German-language lyric poet by integrating his (Celan’s) words and lines and sense and sensibility into Kiefer’s own visual lyric.

We even came back to Paris a little earlier than usual to make sure to see it.

The experience of the show got me wondering all at once about the scope of dance creation. The logic of this wonder is of course complex. In part, I began wondering because I was struck with Anselm Kiefer’s, the show curators’ and Paul Celan’s intention and deliberation, with the venue’s place, placement and statement in its immediate environment. In part, I was struck with the show’s space, volume, size, light, shadow, with the editorial in the in the walls and ceilings, positions, with visual inventions, sculpted models and found objects, with tools, materials, material and immaterial effects… In part, I began wondering because of wider-world references in the show: Kiefer’s effect on Celan and Celan’s lyric world and on the sense of these effects Kiefer. Then there’s my own thinking on art structures in general and on dance structures in particular (see: Move that Cat, ‘Cleitus), thoughts on the indistinguishability of intention and accident (see: Machine de Cirque). And finally maybe a bit more in part than my other in-parts, the effects of a long chat I had with the dancer, choreographer, intellectual  Mylène Benoît on why she thinks dance is an essential human need.

Kiefer’s show is a “whole show” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. The neighborhood where it was held was pandemic-appropriate: at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a temporary annex to the Palais, which is in renovation. Ephémère is an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of urban Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that we suspect – Karine and I spent our time in line theorizing – it may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations.

Altogether, the Ephémère space, seeming made-to-order for pandemic times, is also an excellent piece of psycho-esthetic engineering where Kiefer’s art was to best advantage.

But, though accommodating and integrated into the exhibition, Kiefer’s gigantic canvases, life-model jet plane and the blockhouses, its intention and arrangement stands alone, as much a work affecting its showcase as being affected by it. Wherever it travels, and I hope it does travel, it can master its environment.

As spectacle, as in everything else, ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” works really well.

Kiefer, they say, had a large hand in laying out his homage to Celan.

He left behind a lot of tools, equipment, material and unused applications, back near the coffee shop. As if he meant to keep working, or might be called back for maintenance, he’d tidily sorted it all on shelving bearing up, as Atlas might, the Ephémère’s huge volume of tightly-operated light and shadow.

Kiefer’s a complete painter, an expert in producing line, color and texture as well as in the mechanics of perception. Celan is a complete poet, conjuring the texture & tone of a thought or an idea or of an unsayable image and make the surrounding air vibrate with them.

The first few lines of Death Fugue (Todesfuge), a poem that a great many young people in Germany learn in school, give an idea of Celan’s all-round grasp of poetics:

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

wir trinken und trinken … / we drink it and drink it …

Lift a glass to the banality of evil.

Light and dark. Step to one side, you are puzzling symbols, step to another and those are recondite words, step away and a grey wall becomes a horizon, white scars change to plaques of chased silver… To enable the spectator become experiencer of the sensibility that the painter and poet, whatever works, works. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère © Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

This “Schwarze Milch” is surely the universal food and mutter of the self-poisoned, the Kluxer, the Bircher, the Q-Anon dope in his basement lounge, the ultra-violent screed of the Turner Diaries, the black-shirt murder-tech who shoots granny in the face because regulations suggest she might be too weak to work before, before … What was that bureaucratic euphemism for mass murder? … Also, it feels like stumbling on Jeff Davis’ autographed copy of Essai sur les inégalités humaines. Also it feels of a certain moment of warm-beer hilarity, also of the joyful anarchy of Chagall, also, also, also… and, and, and…

About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability [by Tracy Danison]

As a spectator, for me Mickaël Phelippeau’s "De Françoise à Alice" happens especially around ‘intimacy’: looking (both ways), feeling (both ways), touching (both ways), talking (both ways)... Photo©FRAL_Philippe Savoir

We’ve all been getting booster shots self-quarantining these past couple of weeks. 

Karine remarked to me how differently different people are affected by them. She gets a sore arm, for instance, while a day goes by and then I get three days of a mild but depressing cold. Another friend faints, yet another gets so sick she moans she would have done better to get the damned disease naturally. Another has no idea what we’re talking about.

The Covid virus too is now different to what it was before, more contagious: at least three people have called me recently to warn me they’ve tested positive. In nearly two years this has never happened. So, in addition to watching and hearing about the different reactions among people in my circle, I’ve been standing around a lot more in the local pharmacy, watching how differently different perfect strangers take all this different common Covid experience.

Too much testing myself has affected me. I have become very ambivalent about having my nose reamed by a long cotton swab. I would now rather silently submit to an improvised enema from Nurse Ratched than undergo yet again one of these five-second nose swabbings. I have noticed, though, that nobody else in the impossible swarms of those getting tested seems especially troubled by the swabbing experience.

Even so, testing is making me nervouser and nervouser. As I write, I have said ‘No’ to a home test before hosting a perfectly legal, eight-person New Year’s gathering… I shall instead bury myself at the foot of my bed unless an enraged Karine insists on testing that Nurse Ratched/enema proposition.

Has my ‘difference’ – fear and loathing of to Covid testing – crossed into mental ‘disability’? Has difference crossed from ‘can’ do to ‘can’t do’ such that I no longer function in the normal range of humans?

Ridiculous idea. Just because you get a little fed up with something, you don’t slip from your god-given “difference” to “disability” surely… you can still choose… Right?

I have been thinking a lot about “difference” and “disability” for the past couple days, since I saw a mother-daughter dance performance called De Françoise à Alice, choreographed by Mickaël Phelippeau. It appears I’m not the only one to be struck by the performance. It has another date at a new annual arts show at Carreau du Temple called Everybody, so, who knows, perhaps you’ll be able to see it! Everybody, which is open to ‘every body’ in every sense, starts in mid-February and features visual arts, physical training techniques and dance-performance. It’s programming turns, of course, around difference, associating themes such as gender, consciousness and sexuality. For instance, Marta Izquierdo Munoz’s excellent woman-warrior piece Guérillères is featured alongside Annabel Guérédrat’s I’m a Bruja (‘bruja’ = witch) with performances (or performers) that touch on “disability” by doing without specifying, such Chiara Bersani’s Seeking Unicorns. Bersani herself is about two-feet tall. 

The ‘Alice’ of De Françoise à Alice has a disability, too: Down syndrome.

Alice says that Down syndrome is a state of being – “Je suis trisomique” – rather than a burden she has to (awkwardly) bear. She claims, in effect, that the extra chromosome makes her different rather than disabled. Alice is right.

A new festival looks at difference through every body. Photo courtesy Carreau du Temple, Paris

As much as difference allows, Alice can do what she wants to do, just as you and I can, as much individual difference allows. I don’t know if she can boil carrots and most people I know of can, or if she can frog jump five feet high, and most people I know can’t, or if she can pilot the death ship of the Apocalypse, and, I hope most people I know do not want to, but she can certainly do what she wants to as much as the next person can. That means that I can apply the same critical principles to Phelippeau’s choreography as to Alice (and Françoise) ’s performance as I would to any other performers.

When the curtain goes up, it becomes evident immediately that Alice, within Françoise’s caress, is the principal: her performance absorbs me. Alice, in particular, talks, moves, then dances, with aplomb, sensibility and intelligence – as she moves, I meet her movement in my bones and skin. Her movement sharpens and flows into what I perceive as Dance, capital D: she creates and informs a shared happening of feeling, meeting and imagination.

As I come to this realization, it seems obvious to me –  and, Dorothy, I’m not 14 any more –  that my sense of ‘difference’ is distorted by my notion of ‘disability’. ‘Disability’ is a brake on a full appreciation of difference.

The distortion and the brake are owing to my underlying Oomph-capitalism Weltanschauung; I’m defending a moral order I’ve spent most of my life trying to run away from. Oomph-capitalism posits a self-sprung Individual, a paragon of pure, self-sufficient Oomph, not just an honest working fella who resists charity from his betters because they’re too busy pulling up their boot straps and studying the Bible. The Oomph paragon is the One Who Needs Nothin’ From Nobody. In the Oomph-capitalist mindset, it is not Oliver Twist’s Oomph that leaves Mr. Bumble sputtering but Oliver’s self-incriminating admission that he needs ‘more’ food, more ‘help’.

The 1990 movie Pretty Woman, “a modern-day fairy-tale”, which played on one of the local television channels as uplifting Christmas-spirit duff, figures Oomph ideology pretty well. Although he must, as for every other primate, have been born squalling for his mother’s tit, Oomph paragon, the handsome Richard Gere, opens the script by showing how he needs nothing: not money, nor pretty women, nor even driving lessons for his fancy car. The unnecessary hero and pretty woman of the title, played by a nubile but gum-chewing Julia Roberts, on the other hand, is surrounded by friends eagerly helping her become a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute. Roberts spends the whole script showing she has enough natural Oomph-capitalist fiber to need no help from nobody neither, thus winning the utterly self-sufficient Richard Gere and, with him, a life among people she can ignore or tip, as she pleases, fuck you.

The idea of ‘disability’ suggests, without asserting a concrete claim, that, in some cases, difference goes beyond ‘natural’ difference. That’s to say that with an unlimited acceptance of difference, some humans will get what they need with, as Allen Ginsberg famously demanded, just their good looks. That would be egalitarianism run wild. ‘Disability’ makes an imaginary line beyond which ordinary rules of fairness and justice don’t apply and notions of ‘special’ humans – not just Alice with 21 chromosomes, but especially Richard Gere with billions of inherited dollars – can apply. Alice may get a little more help and protection than, say, my cross-eyed grandson, but Richard Gere, besides getting to keep everything he is born with, gets self-iterating superiority rather than mere difference to go with it. On the one hand, he can test Julia Roberts’ (or your) existential merit and call attention to his own Oomph-virtue by doing so: Roberts’ obvious (social and moral) disability validate whatever bribes the Oomph paragon proffers.

In short, ‘disability’ is about as seamless a con-trick as there is for making sure “accepting difference” doesn’t mean actually accepting it.

Imagine “Guérillères”: gender and the warring spirit [by Tracy Danison]

“Guérillères” worked on me like a charm; as I watch it all makes perfect sense; especially, I have space to see the nonsense in it – Photo©MarcCoudrais

Sex. Gender.

A couple years ago, my class was talking about the puzzle of sex education. Why is there no sex education? Everybodysays they want it, but, somehow, nobody ever gets anything but an embarrassed cough.

Tom, to whom Senator Josh Hawley, R-Nostalgia, and Rudyard Kipling before him, would point as a flower of the race – Indeed a boy: gifted with a penis, handsome, sweet, intelligent, with just the right whiff of privilege – speaks up. He says something like, Resistance to sex education is unconscious, mass-scale reaction, a silent barricade against Universal Liberty. If the people really knows about sex, he concludes, Goodbye, gender. And, Goodbye gender means, comrades, Hello, Revolution!

Silence. One thinks of Danton. Tom’s eyes glitter. Juliette’s breast visibly heaves. She frowns.

We found Wonderland and life was never worse and never better / … Strangers watching and whispers turn to talking and talking turns to screams…

Tom’s right, of course. Ignorance about the “sex impulse”, as George Orwell I think used to put it, complicates undoing our gender knots.

And there is a shared conspiracy of silence around sex that keeps gender at the center of our lives.

But the question is, as it always is for everything, what to do until we get to utopia?

Josh Hawley, et al., are clear on their narrative: a racially-healthy Boy’s Own world trains its boys for the militia and fits its girls for wedding veils. On the other hand, as Tom and Juliette et al. claw, thrash and groan toward universal Aquarian liberation, at least part of the story-line is to let the girls play at warriors, just like the boys… like, uh, equal employment opportunity.

All this reflection on sex and gender bubbled up as I watched Marta Izquierda Munoz and her [lodudo] producciontroupe’s very entertaining, very informed, very well-played Guérillères dance performance at the Atelier de Paris the other evening.

 “Guérillères” got me wondering whether the cult of Amazons isn’t hiding its own racially-healthy “Girl’s Own” scenario: train the females for the militia then fit on wedding veils – Photo©MarcCoudrais

Guérillères – “Guerillas” –  bills itself as a “choreographic tableau of a community in action,” that is “chaotic, organic and utopian”. Guérillères pairs with another piece, Imago-Go, a 2018 creation featuring a “slightly dysfunctional” and stiff band of baton-twirling majorettes.

For the Atelier production of Guérillères, I was particularly struck by the costuming. As the troupe moves through a catalogue of Amazon – girl-warrior – gestures and poses, I am constantly aware of fuzzy garters against flesh and the girl-warrior tropes represented on each performer’s tee-shirt.

As I watch, the fuzzy garters remind me of an underlying eroticism in the action without pointing a type of sexuality. The tee-shirt images feature three Amazon brands: Wonder Woman-like bosoming-invincibility, a smooth-thighed mistress of the Thyrsus (you know, those magic-phallus things crazy ancient Greek ladies carry around just in case men come into the sacred glade, or something) and, finally, the doe-eyed Manga girl-hero, mouth in gigantic mid-shout. As Guérillères rolls out, these tee-shirt graphics become real archetypes and choreographic reference points.

Played as a triptych, as it seems to me, the lanky male performer, Eric Martin, and the svelte, deliberate Izquierda Munoz play straight an intensely comic Adeline Fontaine.

The shtick works like this: male Martin is the Amazon. Izquierda Munoz is a sort of imperturbable Glynda,  white witch, the one with the plan once you’ve brought back the ruby slippers. Martin is as solid a warrior girl as comes along. His get up pre-empts whatever homo-erotic expectation of transvestitism I might have; Martin wears his fake and exposed amazon tit with as much – and not a whit more – elegance as either Fontaine or Izquierda Munoz wears theirs. Fontaine’s superb “power” aping and grimacing and her sans-pareil air-weapon handling – bow & arrow, machine gun and broadsword, thank you – make her the Warrior Martin’s Amazon, to Izquierda Munoz’s white witch.

It worked on me like a charm; as I watch it all makes perfect sense; especially I have space to see the nonsense in it.

To think I almost didn’t go because it sounded like politics to me.

I go to dance performance to stimulate my Imagination, not to have somebody’s story-line shoved in my face. So, politics – especially my own politics – pissed over even very good dance tends to keep this roach out of the hotel.

But Marta Izquierda Munoz and the [lodudo] produccion troupe know how to turn concept, choreography, performance technique and set into a happening now where Imagination can undo whatever story-board a spectator has in their head and laugh about it, to boot. For me, Guérillères works out as the first satire that I have seen involving re-gendering, ungendering, whatever.

Marta Izquierda Munoz’s piece is not only refreshing, it also has got me wondering whether we ought to dump this girl-warrior narrative from the politics of Aquarian liberation. After all, let it be bosomed and in skirts, the Amazon trope is a warrior trope. And it’s pretty damn dumb.

Performing time present - Petter Jacobson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobson’s “Air condition” opens the Nancy Opera’s “Ready Made” 21-22 season. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Originally laid out to impose rational charm on what I get the impression was a rather higgledy-piggledy daily reality, there is a lot to be said for 18th-century provincial cities such as Nancy. That rational charm remains hard at work in our topsy-turvy 21^st century. From the (tidy, practical) rail station to the picture-postcard place Stanislaus, the French take on “appreciate” comes to mind: the eye weighs without judgement, our sensibility pleased but not teased by well-kept and commodious Art-Nouveau buildings added into, around and within the softened but well-ordered lines and stylized gorgon-medallions of the little city’s Age-of-Reason-style baroque.

Inside and out, Nancy’s opera house, on the place Stanislaus, the destination of my walk and where I was to see Petter Jacobson and Thomas Caley’s brand new Air Condition dance performance for the Ballet de Lorraine, recalls this same rational charm. Reconstructed with the new materials and methods developed and used by Art Nouveau and with its place in the urban environment as esthetic baseline, the turns on spectator experience and performance needs seriously: it calls attention to itself only as its design, space and decoration lend themselves to experience and need. Nice place, Nancy!

In the mix of wider cultural themes – the Baroque, Art Nouveau – it seems to me that Nancy enjoys a continuity of local intentions and perspectives that create the city’s present moment. Nancy is its own unique place. And without my being able to put my finger on exactly why, this sense of continuity needs the breaks and punctuations of the randomly preserved fractions of mine-worker housing and randomly-sited contemporary metal-plastic-glass-on-asphalt-in-grass residence-asteroids glimpsed from the train. Also the fashionable clothing in the shop windows, the people on the streets and cafés and the unexpected surge of people coming into the opera house to see the show. Maybe the continuity needs pointing so we can make sense of it as a “present moment”.

As I went in the door of the opera, got my tickets and looked around, I was actually thinking: Is continuity of intention a continuity of place and people shaping each other over time?; is “past” a pastiche of intention that consciousness automatically orders to keep me sane?; is past therefore a retroactive simulacrum of present?

By synchronicity, as I lounged in my seat and went over the program, I learned that “Ready Made”, the 2021-22 thematic for the Ballet de Lorraine’s four performances and Air condition, the first of the four, turn around “movement of the visualized world”. In other words, the pieces explore qualities such as “continuity”: “time”, “duration”, the “present”, “past” or “time” with bodies in movement.

Air Condition starts up Ready Made’s exploring of the time theme with a production based on Yves Klein’s 1954 unproduced ballet, La Guerre (de la ligne et de la couleur). Klein wanted La Guerre to materialize in bodies and movement the immateriality of his work on line and color. Which Jacobson’s does with aplomb.

Tomás Saraceno sets Klein’s concern in a peculiarly imperfect white-grey flicker of what might be a pre-1960s movie. The flicker is bisected by a black line that projects enough visual umph to make a spectator imagine “line of horizon” but recalls “separating” rather than actually separating or distancing anything. Saraceno’s setting is well-washed with a deliberated soundscape composed by Eliane Radigue. Like line of horizon, the composition has just enough music umphto determinedly lead up to some brilliant apotheosis without ever bumping triumphantly (tumbling disconsolately away from) into it.

“Air condition” picks up Yves Klein's war against color and line. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Dressed in shades and facets of the set’s lights by Ballet de Lorraine costumer Birgit Neppl and her team, Air condition’s twenty-four bodies in movement eventually collide, provoking emotional shape and substance in the process.

With a body pressing into an elastic horizon as multi-point of reference, bodies suddenly spin into the air and disappear from the roiling movement up and down the stage. Once recovered from the first, unexpected, plunge into the void, I’m asking, Losing grip or willing to go? and editorializing, All that separates the living and the dead is time?

Meanwhile, the horizon transforms from line to space to surface, the set from black sun to white light setting – could be vice versa, too – from an inside to an outside.

As a meticulously conceived and executed choreography, Air condition is a great success.

But it owes its success as a performance to the individuals of the Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because Jacobson’s vision of how to perform turns on encouraging diversity, turning away  the old idea of unity embodied in “one from many” toward a new type of unity: ‘many ones” in which performers in movement find each other again and again in the movement of each and then of all.  The sense of the choreography articulates and projects itself through performer diversity – the expression of an individual’s quality as a body, a personality and a flow movement.

So I came away from Jacobson’s  Air condition as I came away from the Jacobson’s Plaisirs inconnus: a bit stunned by the strength of feeling “many one” deploys.

The Sunday afternoon I saw Air condition, Petter Jacobson was named to the Ordre des arts et lettres for his contributions to dance performance. Though the citation named many of the choreographer’s admirable qualities, doings and deeds, it didn’t mention achieving a “many ones” performance team among them.  For my money, it should have been at the top of the list.  

Trollus ex machina: It’s mine and I’ll do what I wanna [by Tracy Danison]

The eye of the storm

“That is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”  

                                                                            - Lesley Gore, 1964

Last Spring, in the aftermath of a social media harassment incident involving some of my students, I was chatting about internet trolling and trolls with one of the victims, Ariadne – an aptly-named and particularly bright star in physics. Ariadne has developed a trollus-ex-machina theory that explains internet trolling’s inelegant peevishness, as well what seems to be an increasing number of internet users who adopt a troll posture – a sort of diffuse pugnaciousness, she means.

She says that we usually think that when we yell at, for instance, a malfunctioning coffee maker, we are anthropomorphizing – imagining the metal and plastic thing as if it were another human to whom we could transfer our pain or whom we could hold responsible for our pain – you know, like our favorite human punching bag, souffre-douleur, scapegoat. There’s no such anthropomorphizing going on, she says. Whether we know it or not, when something is a machine, we treat it as a machine, we treat it as we do other, less developed, stuff and things; we’re yelling at the coffee maker because it’s something people do.

She goes on to say that because we access the internet with machines – the “hardware” – behavior there is shaped by an (unacknowledged) belief that internet activity is machine interface, not a form of human interaction. In other words, while users tell themselves their pithy “tweets”, or however we call verbal sallies these days, are bits of human-human interaction, their mental mode is machine interface: yelling at the coffee maker.

In respect to trolls and trolling, the upshot of Ariadne’s theory is that internet behavior owes more to internet users’ belief about their relationship to “stuff” and “things” than to an individual user’s poor grasp of successful human communications. 

Ariadne’s theory has terrifying implications, though as I opened my eyes increasingly wide with dismay as I listened, it wasn’t clear to me she really understood why.

Likely, she isn’t yet fully aware that contemporary humans mostly believe the “things” and “stuff” of the world  are almost entirely survival tools put at their disposition by some sort of cosmic IKEA.

Nor is it likely she has yet realized that, as a practical expression of this belief in the nature of the world around, no doubt with an exception somewhere, human societies operate value systems that dispose all stuff and things in terms of their utility for humans and human goals. “Utility”, when it comes to things and stuff, spins down to individuals as life in a system of ownership/non-ownership: behavior in respect to stuff or things is entirely determined by whether you or somebody else “claims” them. As long as some stuff or some thing has no other “claimant” or if the “lawful claimant” is “I/we”, we can do what I/we feel with it. 

She probably hasn’t fully grasped that, in our particular society – the one that has been pretty good to her so far and probably will continue to smile as she goes along –  there are some distinctive twists and turns in the ownership idea that set a rather unsettling background tone.

For instance, we must always first make “thing” the “other” we wish to dominate or eliminate. As Ariadne notes, no anthropomorphizing is involved in yelling at the coffee machine, it’s just a machine, a thing and that's what things get. When one human yells at another human, however, the yeller is “otherhooding” the yellee – symbolically transforming the other human into a thing as other things.

The danger of getting “thingomorphized” is why we humans are so touchy about getting yelled at: thingomorphism demonstrates just how great our dependence is – spouse, child, employee – that is, how much of our humanness depends on the quality of personal relationships, social place or social utility. It is no accident, for instance, that Ursula K. Le Guin’s “propertarians” spend a great deal of time theorizing about “natural differences”.

In terms of the background tone of our lives, a constant need to establish an appropriate level of otherhood before summarily dominating or eliminating another human lends a peculiar violence to our political struggles for equality. Think of the cold hand of a Dementor bearing down on Harry Potter’s shoulder. Forever.

The inherent cruelty of our, let’s call it, “ownership management system” not only installs a universal nervousness about our status, it also seems to generate a vague awareness of the shame of such a social disposition.

In some jurisdictions, demonstrating one’s right to do as one pleases with one’s stuff and things must be done out of sight. As well, destruction of potentially shared resources must sometimes be blessed by a majority or, at least, the processes of the local legal system. For instance, we may certainly kill our pets or our livestock, only not, for example, by public hanging; you may very well need a government permit before you can dump poisons into your watershed.

In light of the operation of contemporary society’s “ownership management system”, if an internet troll is, as Ariadne says, ex machina, then the troll’s psychological point of departure – indeed, all internet users’ psychological point of departure – is pure, unadulterated, megalomaniacal “I/we, mine, it’s-my-party-and-I’ll-do-what-I-wanna”.

As if the universe is intent to send me to my therapist for depression, a couple of weeks after my chat with Ariadne I was trolled! Of all things, on The Best American Poetry! This forced me to think about trolls and trolling in light of Ariadne’s theory and its somber implications.

It seems to me, then, that trolls of old and trolls today are, structurally at least, recognizably both trolls a trolling. If there are more trolls doing more trolling, it’s not due to some moral change in people but to technology, commercial policy and practices and cost. Together, these factors lead to an increase in the volume of the practice. Volume in turn intensifies feedback loops which then intensify certain qualities, which in turn inspire new-type responses, and on and on.

I was trolled in pre-internet times from time to time, by a scorned love, by a professional rival, by a cracked & peeling brother. Through them, I accumulated years and years of long long, unsigned letters full of pained reproach and venom, hushed swirls of untraceable but plausible lies about myself spilled into the ears of, especially, those most capable of dashing my hopes, along with laughable but dangerous denunciations made to those most able to hurt me in the moment. There’s story in those old trolls, bottom born of the risks of human interaction.

The retrospective drama of it, the sincerity of my old trolls and the inventiveness of their old-time trolling seems not to compare with a couple utterly generic lame-brained one-word insults from these utterly anonymous new-fangled internet trolls – “dink”, “asshole” – and a half-witted attempt at what I think is meant as parody.

But on consideration, circumstances and degrees eliminated, past and present trolls share two formal characteristics.

The first characteristic is obscure malevolence – a will to do ill. Why otherwise would anyone invest even a moment in such an exercise? Malevolence manifests according to the intensity of the troll’s natural disposition – like everything else in us, it follows some sort of distribution curve, I guess – and immediate feeling. Manifested malevolence ranged in pre-internet times and ranges now, from low-feeling disagreeable remarks, insults, and threats to harassment such as dog-shit on the doorstep to spamming and unarmed stalking right on up to really-strong-feeling physical assault and murder.

The second characteristic of pre- and internet trolls is manipulation of anonymity or other social distance to free the troll from responsibility for trolling. In the old days, not signing a poison-pen letter, a target’s reputational considerations and a general indifference or hostility of authority to anybody who shouldn’t be whining usually gave the troll free reign.

Nowadays, the titans of social media have made “anonymous, free communication” – Encrypted from end to end! – the cornerstone of a commercial strategy for harvesting personal information and selling it on to the highest bidder. This means troll empowerment: the potential for casual irresponsibility on the internet is, like the propagation of Nazi race theory and pedophile conspiracy theories, now in easy reach of even the most palsied will to obscure malevolence.

And, so far as I can tell, the economic structure of trolling has not changed from pre-internet to our times, either.

Trolling still requires only that a troll is able to make a small investment of money and time. In the old days, the investment was a deal of stamps, envelopes and paper and, maybe, a few muffled phone calls from the local booth. Investment in trolling was dissuasive, surely, for low-feeling malevolence, but certainly no bar to a mid- to strong-feeling troll with functional writing skills and an easy job.

Thanks again to anonymous-free-communications, initial and running costs today are close to zero in both money and time – tapping “dink” or “asshole” or a couple of bootless lines is a but a minute’s work. Virtual costlessness enables trolls of all feeling intensities to troll, to troll more often and troll more widely than was possible before.

While it may seem that the troll’s ability to hurt a target must diminish as less time investment in content diminishes its quality, nothing to could be further from the truth. Even if it may be gratifying for the troll to personally wound a target, the whole part of trolling is actually to enable, among others, doubt, contempt, anger and/or hatred about or against the target.

Given that lies or lie equivalents always fly,  simply repeating “dink” or “asshole” or a couple of bootless lines ad infinitum, therefore, is the most cost-effective way of doing the core job, even if the sting of personal malevolence may sometimes be less felt by the target.

So, if, in the pre-internet trolling experience, I could name, along with the trolls themselves, concrete motivating emotions such as anger, jealously or hate, trolling then and now actually requires only an abstract will to obscure malevolence, a flimsy cloak to operate irresponsibility, minimal wherewithal in time and money and, of course, a target. That’s why trolls use ‘bots to do the job where they can and why, also, trolling itself is professionalizing as well as increasingly common as an internet posture.

In light of Ariadne’s Trollus ex machina and the empowerment of obscure malevolence by “anonymous, free communication”, it takes no feat of psychosocial insight to see enormous trolling growth and development potential in our ownership management type society.

With It’s Mine! and an I’ll do what I want shaping the trolling potential of kids who know themselves right to flush their turtles down their toilets, of entrepreneurs pouring heavy metals into their rivers because they may and farmers enslaving migrant fruit pickers because they can, expect more troll-like behavior to spread more widely.

It should be no surprise that as trolling develops steadily, tweeting and suchlike increasingly reads and feels more like trolling: bumptious smugness laced with diffuse put down, insult and even threat. It should be no surprise that a man on trial for saying a public official was going to get “the noose and trapdoor he deserves” says he was “misread” – one needn’t pull one’s punches when yelling at a coffee maker.

Expect worse.