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J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie : Straining every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

A propos his work in general and his latest work, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie, choreographer François Lamargot told me last year that he works out from the idea our civilization suffers from “a handicap of the heart” that prevents it from recognizing its own destructiveness.

By “heart” Lamargot means the balance between physically hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling and reacting or feeling. Feeling starts with self. He says people have become so absorbed in themselves that they’ve forgotten how to look around to see how they’re affecting the world around (See: François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart).

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

As far as creating dance performance is concerned, Lamargot says that to get his thinking across, he wants to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to bring his audience to “sensibility” of this civilizational handicap, rather than intellectual understanding of it – he wants to get beyond words and work on imagination.

And, it turns out, in the dancing, Lamargot creates a prolonged, delicious thrill, a crowd-pleasing thrill, that leaves a spectator sitting wondering just where they are for a minute or two after the applause stops.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Karine, my companion, who was sitting in the seat just next to me waited a minute before smiling, raising both eyebrows and asking how I’d describe what had just happened. Smiling back, I said something like “Pina Bausch grooving on an Apocalypse Giselle”.  Then, something like, “Flawlessly executed by woke break dance brats from the down-at-heel social club in the trash-strewn lot we call the 21^st-century...” I said, “Exciting”.

Karine laughed and, as she does, puffed out a light raspberry, saying, “‘Post-Apocalypse’, you mean”. Then,   after a few seconds she says, “They sure can dance”.

She’s right.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Aided and abetted by well-aimed multi-media effects and great sound arrangement (music including Vivaldi, Gloria Patri; Tom Waits, The Earth Died Screaming; and Taku Sugimoto, Spring) Lamargot’s dance performers are as uninhibited as any 80s-style experimentalist free expressionists. But they never romp. There’s not a tic without an elegant purpose. And within the first 10 minutes, the trim, athletic hip-hop trained performers subjugated Karine and I with a “beyond Waltz” that was both professionally knowing and inspired; alone and together, they radiated the noble sensuality of Waltz …

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

This, what, respect for? genre movement and the layers of expression and sense beneath it characterized the whole piece… Honestly, Karine and I agree, the mix and range of dance skill is so smooth and matched to sensibility as to be indescribable.

Lamargot does claim to have turned out his own genre in what everybody these days seems to be calling “hybrid dance” – combining moves and even ideologies from theater, performance, ballet, modern, contemporary and urban dance in a single choreographic piece. Maybe that’s right. And maybe, in reality, all choreographers have always been doing that. Be all that as it may J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie is dance performance with something quite wonderful in it.

____

I saw “J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” at Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar, 4 February 2024, with performers: Anaïs André, Joël Elisée Konan, Alexandre Gastoud, Oscar Lassus dit Layus, Cassilda Marcoulet, Anabella Pirosento and Erwan Tallonneau. Directorial assistance and costuming: Maryse Poulhe. Interactivity, multimedia, lights and scenography: Claudio Cavallari, Allan Hové and Benjamin Lebreton

Writing urban dance into traditional ecstatics: “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

… And some contrast, comparisons and observations… A Folia (“Folly”) by Marco da Silva Ferreira, performed by Ballet de Lorraine, premiered with Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s Instantly Forever on the same stage on Thursday 7 March at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy, France.

Breathing hard and a little too excited at the end of da Silva Ferreira’s stimulating handiwork, I wanted to call the CaleyJacobssondaSilvaFerreira program a “diptych”.

After all, Jacobsson and Caley chose to invite da Silva Ferreira to Nancy and asked the popular almost hip-hopchoreographer to create a Folia specially for the company they’ve been leading for more than a decade.

But “diptych” would imply “complementarity”, sharing something more than a stage. Or suggest that the same topography of sense is explored, maybe, or, maybe that the same style of approach to movement art is in play.

But the experience of the two dance performances is very different and whatever complementarities my friends at the Nancy ballet might feel, spectator experience is the bottom line. No?

The remarkable reflective black stage floor is shared, for instance. At first look, it seems complementary, but just isn’t. Its choreographic, visual use is too different. For Instantly Forever, it’s a multiplying mirror on a wheeling merry-go-round as against the inviting glitter of a universal urban-dance dancefloor, à la Michele Murray’s Dancefloor, also created for Ballet de Lorraine and premiered in April 2023.

 

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Also, in general, the dominant visual quality of Instantly Forever is saturation, gives a sense of in media res; a Folia is resolutely the sum of its people.

A Folia’s movement is choreographed in the frame of urban dance (hip hop). Urban dance starts as energy and shapes it into dance. Instantly Forever is choreographed in a (free) frame of modern and contemporary dance. Modern and contemporary dance create then shape energy. A spectator feels that difference and the sensibilities that it induces.

Typical in urban dance, the men and women of A Folia scintillate as they gradually fill their dramatic space with loose groups, larger, smaller, individuals. As the men and women find their places in the one large, also loose, group that has taken shape, they become performers – those for whom dance is “performance”, a shaping of their energy as a relationship, I mean.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The rest of da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia choreography also presents pretty much the same as in any urban dance piece: energetic, often duo-ing or coupling or gathering affinity groups, shaping and molding each other, finding unisson (being together). Within unisson, one by one, champions come forward to battle – where a performer shows their moves and interested on-lookers choose “winners” (but not “losers”). For more on urban dance convention, see B.girl, choreographer, member of the jury: Valentine Nagata-Ramos on evaluating Olympic break dance. 

Da Silva Ferreira’s singular attractiveness as an urban dance choreographer is an ability to ignore genre even as he shapes performers and spectators alike around its conventions. In a Folia, as he explains in his notes, he wants to see what ecstasy does and where it gets to (“a folia” (“folly”) refers to acculturated ecstasy dance in Medieval Portugal). In other words, and I’m exaggerating to make the point, if da Silva Ferreira feels he needs to chain together a Krump foot-stomp, a Pina Bausch melodramatic sub-mime and a surprisingly precise grand jété to show out what he wants to show out, he’ll do it.  

An entrancing solo – a real, live New York City Ballet-style solo –  by Céline Shoefs in the midst of a Folia’s kaleidoscope of sets of forms of touching and supporting and showing off underlines my point. No Swan – not Anna Pavlova, not Pedro Pauwels & cie and etc… – ever died with as much spirit in the thing – or as many great moves. En pointe, pirouettes, throw downs and pure expression, elegant and abrupt, assured and modest, Shoefs brings everyone to unisson with her parade. Wonderful work by her.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

And, another Da Silva Ferreira attractive singularity: while the energy and performance-focus involved in, for instance, a tour de force such as Shoefs’ solo, most often comes out as athletic and power in urban dance performance, Ferreira’s hand turns it erotic. Shoefs solo goes beyond affirming her own qualities, goes beyond battle, she happens, preludesencounter.

A Folia’s soundtrack, da Silva Ferreira explains in the program notes, is an iteration of the Early Modern and now pretty universally shared chord progression called “La Folia” or “Folly”, which, as “a Folia” in Portuguese is also ritual ecstasy and carnival-like sexual turnabout.  

The performance’s musical arrangement in effect has electronic musician Luis Pestana “deejaying” Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor La Folia, Op. 5 N°12 by. Pestana’s sounds first push performers and spectators along with a beat that laps at the vibratory edge of techno-club style heart-defibrillation before embracing all in a stimulating beat from beginning to end of the show. Marco da Silva Ferreira is trying to write urban dance into a History of Dance while in its generated sensibility and references Jacobsson and Caley’s Instantly Forever is about history and the experience and perception of history, small h.

And, all this being said, the experience of a Folia left me feeling dizzy-damn good.

So, Bob’s your uncle. When a Folia’s up against Instantly Forever “contrast” best fits the bill.

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine  

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

On historical cuffs and blows: Jacobsson & Caley’s “Instantly Forever” incarnates, pleases [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The premier of the dance performance Instantly Forever by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley, performed by Ballet de Lorraine, took place Thursday, 7 March 2024, at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy, France.

Last time I wrote, I was speculating on the sense of the word group “Instantly Forever”, also the title of Thomas Caley’s and Petter Jacobsson’s last piece as chief choreographers for Ballet de Lorraine as a palimpsest of points and lines in time and painted in movement.

What follows is my live experience as far as I can describe it.

A gigantic symphonic crash makes me jump.

The full cast of twenty-two abruptly turn into one hundred faces that face me. Before or after the crash? Not sure.

The floor of the stage is mirror black. 

Four or six or eight long, silver poles, hang from scaffolding above, frame the six hundred dancers as they might for painted wooden horses, Indian elephants or Bakelite autos on an old merry-go-round. There’s one a little like it in Luxembourg Gardens.

Saturation.

On their tee-shirts, the eight hundred wear selfies of themselves.

Each moves according to their penchant. Saturation of people. Groups show out and sort in a slow, wheeling throng.

I notice the music.

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Caley and Jacobsson have chosen for Instantly Stravinsky’s avant garde score Le Sacre du Printemps, made for Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes, which premiered a hundred and 10 years ago, on 29 May 1913. Also, extracts from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians Pulses Section I and Section II. I see in mind’s eye, from a Lafayette Anticipations catwalk, 15 September 2018, Yuika Hashimoto wheeling Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Violin Phase rosace. From 1981, it’s De Keersmaeker’s first work. My heart still thumps when I think of it.

Le Sacre is a ritual début performance for dance initiates to this day. At least in France. At least from Béjart.

Ballets Russes’ Le Sacre du Printemps caused a sensation. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie were assassinated exactly a year and 1 month later, 29 June 1914. Which seemed significant then. Sensation rattles on, notably in the sandbagged dressing room windows at Kiev Opera House.

Among other things, Le Sacre evokes people as one species among others, as originators of their desires, as actors of their myths, as victims of all that – Caley, especially, enthuses about Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

I think, in its resounding way, Le Sacre must be Freud, Jung, Rothko, Rosa Parks, Roe vs Wade and World War III, too.

I look up.

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Seeing one thousand in movement, I remember a trailer from the movie of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. It shows cells under a microscope swaying along in a flicker-flow. It puzzled me then. The 1 thousand dancing are bound by the space around them; what separates them by eye is the boundary of contact …

When I find I am not looking up, I do.

The applause begins. The lights go up…

I come away, touched.

Later, when I scan the program notes during the intermission, I read that the choreographers meant Steve Reich’s repetitive sounds to plunge me “into a perpetual, repetitive and hypnotic motion” that invited me to contemplation.

I’m thinking it’s odd what images of the splashing cascade of sense information we experience sticks to the memory.

If what sticks is so personal and contextual as to be random, what’s all this guff about History, then?

As I’m returning to my seat for a Folia, the next piece on the Ballet’s program, what, with the experience of Instantly Forever in mind and a little champagne, I’m thinking sourly, but not unreasonably, that History as it’s a time line thus far, anyhow, might be, as dear old Ebenezer Scrooge puts it, “a bit of undigested beef”.

That is, History is analogous to the cumulative effect of a rain of cuffs and blows on the head of an autistic kid by a petulant, infernal Father, in spirit, three years old. Each cuff and each blow is a black point or blob of hurt and resentment stitched together by pain and incomprehension. History of points and lines like this would go some way toward explaining Vladimir Putin as a leader, Donald Trump as God’s Messiah, and Israel eyeless in Gaza…  

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

______________

In coming months you can catch the Ballet de Lorraine on tour in these venues across France (and Morocco and Italy, too):

26 March, La Rotonde, Thaon-les-Vosges :

Twelve Ton Rose (Trisha Brown)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

4 and 5 May, Le Hangar Y, Meudon

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

23, 24, 25 and 26 May, Opéra national de Lorraine, Nancy

Màlon, new creation & premier (Ayelen Parolin)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

1 June, CCN d'Aix-en-Provence

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Morocco tour, Instituts Français du Maroc

5 June, Casablanca

6 June, El Jadida

7 June, Rabat

9 June, Meknes

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival Freestyle, Paris

22 and 23 June, La Villette,

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival de Montpellier Danse

30 June, Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley), Place de la Comédie

2 and 3 July, Dancefloor (Michèle Murray), Agora

5 July, Soirée Merce Cunningham, Opéra Comédie

CRWDSPCR, RainForest, Sounddance

15 July, Bolzano (Italy) Danza Festival

Sierras, Danses Atmosphériques (Michele di Stefano)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

28, 29 and 30 July, Le Voyage à Nantes, Le Feydball

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

 

 

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: a point in time, a line, the line, a period, instantly and forever [By Tracy Danison]

"Discofoot" (2016), Ballet de Lorraine, by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

I take the title Instantly Forever a couple of ways. Instantly is forever. Forever is an instant. I can reformulate that as I might in my philosophical cups: I never step into the same river twice; everything, including self, flows. Line and period. Particle. Wave. In my ordinary way of framing everyday action, I put “Instantly Forever” something like this: the present moment is all the feeling, experience and events + myself of the past.

In an ordinary way, I reckon, “Instantly Forever” describes Thomas Caley and Petter Jacobsson’s meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine back in 2011. They came to Nancy in the wake of Didier Deschamps’ very successful mandate there; Deschamps was going on to successfully lead the Théâtre national de Chaillot (National Dance Theater, ‘Chaillot’), which he did until just three years ago, when he was replaced by Rachid Ouramdane, now running Chaillot.

Petter Jacobsson (L), Thomas Caley (R). Photo © Ballet de Lorraine - CCN

In addition to planning their future inside somebody else’s great professional success, the couple stepped into France’s sociocultural reality: “You can’t just fire everybody and stamp your name on things because the law won’t let you,” notes Caley. “You just can’t start over. So you have to work with memory ([memory:] what has been done and thought and felt)”.

To begin talks with the former director’s successful troupe, Jacobsson and Caley brought the popular choreographer, (working) dancer and interdisciplinary artist La Ribot to Nancy.

“She asked everybody their opinion. There was some turnover, of course, but [from La Ribot’s intervention] we had our basic group.”

There is something of “Instantly Forever” in La Ribot, too. “[La Ribot’s] solo and collective performances, installations, films and videos are the many facets of a practice”, says her website, “that constantly focuses on the rights of the body”. That means, I think, from having seen the multidisciplinary artist’s choreographic work, that she has no truck with the destructive body-stressing that a lot of classical and modern dance performance practice has associated with dance-excellence and a lot to do with the body. Since bodies have different tolerance levels, La Ribot’s practice implies a wider space for individual expression in group performance. I’ve already argued that, as spectator, the diversity of individual expression within a troupe performance is the outstanding characteristic of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine (Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: how to choreograph availability).

Rehearsal for “a Folia” (“Folly”), creation by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Ballet de Lorraine – CCN

If the meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine was a line and a period, a work in memory and an affirmation of a choice in dance performance practice, in an ordinary way, Caley’s and Jacobsson’s past experience is also “Instantly Forever”.

The couple came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s – they met each other in Manhattan in 1994, with Caley just a few years into a high-level dance performance career and Jacobsson moving from prestige dance to doing his own performance and choreography thing. They frequented Mother and Bar Room 432, where new spectrum was being added to the culture.

In the post-Stonewall, punker, world, politics and arts of community – especially queer –  were tweaking out new spaces for dance and performance, visual arts (integrating audio-visual technologies into live performance, deejaying and public participation formats, for example) and the limits of the acceptable imagination. These came together with undertakings such as Clit Club, MEAT, Jackie 60, Martha@Mother and Click + Drag.  

Jacobsson and Caley did choreography for Martha@Mother, Richard Move’s Martha Graham love and deconstruction dance performance.

When invited to Stockholm to direct the Royal Swedish Ballet of Stockholm in 1999, Jacobsson and Caley decided to use the Ballet, along with the Royal Opera and its Orchestra, and outside artists to both blur the lines between performance and non-performance space, public- and citizen-space and bring together insiders and outsiders, spectators and performers with two huge (and publically and critically acclaimed) happenings in the Royal Opera House. Without even talking about the science and philosophy behind it, I think that it can be argued that, in those days, all that was new – as if a guerilla theater had recruited Everyman to dance a conceptual Swan Lake by Tracey Emin. It worked for the public, too.

Air-Condition (2021), Ballet de Lorraine, by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Emilie-Salquebre

So, success feeds success. When they set up their own company after 2001, Caley and Jacobsson were especially eager, they say, to “push the lines between norms” with their own work. Titles such as Unknown partner, Flux, No mans land - no lands man and The nearest nearness represent their search, I would say, to interpenetrate “instantly” and “forever”.

And in Stockholm, at the beginning of the 21^st century, Caley and Jacobsson agree, they were trying to continue, as they say, pushing the lines between norms or, as I put it, interpenetrating instantly and forever, the period and the line, the past and the present, dance and performance: Untitled Partner #3, Performing performing, Rêlache (“Let go”or “Free day”),Timetable, Armide (viz., Lully’s 1686 opera-ballet), Record of ancient things, L’envers (“Reverse”, “Upside down”, “Behind”), Revue Moderne, For Four Walls, Discofoot (“Disco(dancing)+foot(ball”), Haendel with care, Air-condition and Mesdames et Messieurs…

Instantly, thus, Forever.

____

I talked to Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley about their work so far in Paris in January 2024.

Spring & Summer 2024, Ballet de Lorraine: “A Folia” (“Folly”), the new creation by Marco da Silva Ferreira will premier with Petter Jacobsson’s and Thomas Caley’s “Instantly Forever”. The couple’s last Spring and Summer in Nancy also includes Ayelen Parolin’s new creation, “Malón”. Other Nancy-grown creations for the season include “Static Shot” by Maud Le Pladec, created for Ballet de Lorraine in 2020 along with Michele di Stefano’s “Danses Atmosphériques”, 2022 and Caley and Jacobsson’s “Discofoot”. Other Ballet de Lorraine productions include works such as Trisha Brown’s “Twelve-ton Rose” and three Merce Cunningham pieces, “Sounddance”, CRWDSPCR”, “RainForest”. Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot” will be the final production in July. Le Pladec succeeds Jacobsson and Caley as director of the Ballet de Lorraine.

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: how to choreograph availability [By Tracy Danison]

Rehearsal for “Instantly forever”, Petter Jacobsson's and Thomas Caley's swan song for Ballet de Lorraine, premiers at the Opéra de Lorraine, 7 March 2023. Photo © CCN – Ballet de Lorraine

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley, the creative partnership that has been keeping up, progressing and shaping Ballet de Lorraine (Centre Chorégraphique National - CCN) into one of the best regional dance troupes in Europe since 2011, are leaving at the end of the current season. 2024 also marks 30 years for the couple’s creative partnership.

In the beginning of this year, I got to talk with Jacobsson and Caley. Before we met, I told them that I was thinking about their care and feeding of Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because, as a spectator, I have always been impressed by what I think of as the company’s “lability of individuals and invisible discipline”.

“Invisible” references the, mostly unexplored and intangible, quite real, intelligence that inspires relationships and holds people together.

I say “invisible discipline” rather than “transparent” because, while many companies seem to transparently shape themselves around an idea, the Ballet de Lorraine troupe seems to use each person’s intelligence of the other to form and shape an idea such as “Instantly forever”, the title, theme and idea of the Caley and Jacobsson’s latest creation.

Put it this way. It seems to me that while most companies respond to Blake’s Urizen – “One command, one joy, one desire/One curse, one weight, one measure” – the Lorraine troupe responds to e pluribus unum, as it says on the Almighty Dollar, “From many, one”.

Petter Jacobsson (L) and Thomas Caley (R) are leaving Ballet de Lorraine. Photo © CCN – Ballet de Lorraine

As the conversation with Jacobsson and Caley went along, I realized that when it comes to understanding Ballet de Lorraine’s “individual lability and invisible discipline”, wondering about care and feeding is wrongheaded, like asking a successful basketball coach about dribbling technique.

Jacobsson and Caley, pleasant, generous and charming as they are, don’t care and feed anybody. They respect them as individuals in their circumstances, as they do between themselves. As they talked I see them practice their approach, their attitude, their state of mind: a strong emotional empathy, not a set of commands and rules, oils the gears of their interactions between themselves, with me; intellectual empathy and a focus on results, rather than a rally to a pre-fabricated idea, fuels their conversation between themselves, with me.  

Near the end of our conversation, Jacobsson says, “It’s called the ‘Ballet’ de Lorraine, but we’re thinking of ‘Dance’. The troupe is a reflection of the society [that it is part of]. Grab onto the dance [that is there]”. Caley breaks in, “It’s not that we think ‘Everybody can dance’, but that everybody is proficient and professional at what they do. We want proficiency in doing above everything”…

Together, they insist, “Our idea is ‘Stay available [for the other, for dance]”.’; ‘Believe in what you are doing’”.

The two men search, express and shape rather than explain. Their approach to the Ballet de Lorraine is simply “Follow me!”. So, when, as a spectator, I see “invisible discipline” and “lability” in the Lorraine troupe, I am seeing emotional and intellectual empathy in action: individuals who are available to each other who are doing their best to express and shape a theme or an idea.

Christine Bastin: You won’t have the words for your transcendence. But your dance will [By Tracy Danison]

Christine Bastin, center rear, artistic director, Fabrique de la Danse, with students. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

Christine Bastin is a co-founder, with Orianne Vilmer, of Fabrique de la Danse, where Bastin has been artistic director and Vilmer has been director since 2015. Fabrique de la Danse was the first and remains the only dance school currently able to deliver a professional certification for choreographers.

Bastin calls herself a “dance native” and says she does not remember a time when she did not dance. She began dancing at 7 or 8 years old and was among the first graduates of Danse Création, an innovative contemporary dance performance school in the northern city of Lille, a brainchild of the charismatic dancer and teacher Anne-Marie Debatte (1918-2002), which opened its doors in 1975. Dance Création philosophy and mission were to educate and train “strong, joyful and responsible beings in relation with others and present in the world”. 

Debatte was among the pioneers in opening (or re-opening) dance to encompass and include human difference with intergenerational dance, dance for seniors and persons with disabilities as well as promoting dance in schools, businesses and public institutions such as senior living. Currently an associate at the coaching and well-being consultancy Optimé Persona, Christine Bastin has made this openness to movement activities and publics a significant part of her career.

“Lessons in dance were lessons in living,” Christine Bastin tells me. Her teachers and fellow students were a second family. She learned, she says, “not just to dance but also to put on a show, to teach and to create”, all the skills that she continues to use to this day.

For Bastin, dance is a spiritual resource. She describes it almost as a demiurge or spirit guide. “Dance was always there for me,” Bastin says. “It made me happy. It made it possible to express the joy I felt within myself. Dance is the creation of the world. Movement is living. If we leave it alone, dance will join [the split in] our body and mind”.

I ask her, To what end? Where does dance lead us?

She replies, “I’m looking for a transcendence. I think we are all looking for a transcendence.” When transcendence comes, she says, we won’t have the words for it, but dance will.

Christine Bastin came on the scene when the Nouvelle Danse Française – a movement away from the formalisms of American-style modern dance and Opera-de-Paris-style ballet – was expanding into the broad notion that has become “contemporary dance [performance]”. She joined other disciples of AlwIn Nikolaïs (an early actor in the Nouvelle Danse, a proponent of multimedia input in live performance and of “total dance” and dance as an aspect of an “art of motion” which is both message and medium, who arrived in Paris from the USA in 1968) in seeking new ways to perform and understand dance.

Bastin started dancing with choreographer Christine Gérard’s cie ARCOR. Gérard, along with Carolyn Carlson, Dominique Bagouet and Jaque Chaurand is among the best-known and most iconic movers of contemporary dance performance into the present.

Christine Bastin dancing her ”Fruition” (2013). Photo © cie la folia

Since the mid-1980s, Bastin has authored and produced more than 40 dance-performance choreographies, including guest pieces for prestigious events such as Biennale de danse de Lyon and Festival d’Avignon.

“Dance creation is a mirror of the self,” Bastin says. “Building a dance is to give form to an equilibrium which will then unbalance to bring about another equilibrium”, which equilibrium will then birth another...”. Bastin smiles pleasantly: “One dance can hide another”, in the way trains can.   

In the choreographic process, she continues, movement cleans up the original thought or idea behind it. In movement, the body has its own thought. ‘Mind-thought’ is the detonator for the ‘body-thought’” that gives real substance to dance performance.

Each of her choreographies, Bastin says, corresponds to some aspect of self-discovery, expression, opening outward or inclusion. Her Gueule du Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), which she was invited to write for the 1992 Biennale de danse de Lyon, is an example.

Intellectually framed, as she explains it, by Federico Garcia-Lorca’s idea of duende –  …  “a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought”… – and with the thought of exploring the power of the unexpressed emotion such as Camilo José Cela dramatizes it in his classic The Family of Pascual Duarte, Gueule du Loup began with the question, mind-thought, “How do you express the great feeling inside you when there are no words for it”? or “How can the ‘poor in spirit’ make themselves exist?”

As Gueule du Loup responds to these questions, Bastin says, its movement, its body-thought, corresponds to “transmission to amateurs”. “The piece is simple and complex at the same time,” she explains, “But, especially, it is spiritual. To do the piece, you need technical ability, yes, but also, you need to find yourself as a dancer”.

In fact, Bastin’s involvement with Fabrique de la Danse began when Orianne Vilmer’s amateur dance performance troupe, Danse en Seine, contacted the choreographer about putting on Gueule du Loup.

Promoting and supporting dance performance has played a prominent part of Bastin’s career. She has developed and led dance promotion and sensitization programs the length and breadth of France, in the Paris suburbs and in its regions, as well as in Africa and Eastern Europe. “Dance connects us,” Bastin explains, giving me the example of an improvisational dance exercise: “Nobody has the steps or the music, but everybody has the appetite and the curiosity. Pressed by the appetite and the curiosity, the connection [that takes shape as dance] falls into place.”

______

I first met Christine Bastin at the Pavillon Carré Baudoin, once a country pleasure palace and, now beautifully restored, sitting on the very-urbanized lip of the rue des Pyrénées where it meets rue de Menilmontant. Bastin was watching her students and colleagues go through the public performance for the Fabrique de la Danse’s end-of-year 2022-2023 celebration. We met again to talk about “What is dance for”? in October 2023.

Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:

La Folia (1986), Bless (1989), Abel Abeth (1990), Grâce (1991), Gueule de loup (1992), Affame (1993), Siloé (1994), La Polka du roi (1996), La Fugue (1996), Première neige (1997), Le p’tit Bal (1996), Noce (1998), L’eau vive (1998), Be(1999), Pigeon vole (2000), Un ange à la mer (2001), Pietà (2001), Elle & Lui (2003), De la lune et de l’eau (2003), Les mots blancs (2005), Florentina (2005), Même pas seul (2006), Celui qui danse (2006), Mariam (2007), J’m’attache à toi(2008), L’Entrouvert (2008), L’eau de personne (2010), Soir d’avril (2011), Fruition (2013), Cette parcelle de trésor(2013), Danse avec mon père (2014) and Noce l’invisible (2022).

Hey-ho Billy Pilgrim! 2024 is 1979 and getting worse [By Tracy Danison]

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Jérémy Meysen

Remember the scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five when, from behind his bandages, Billy Pilgrim whispers “I was there” to fellow patient Eliot Rosewater? There meant at the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War.

Billy’s “I was there” is the debut of a short career explaining that Time is of a piece, a Truth he learned when kidnapped and living among the ETs of the planet Tralfamadore.

I fell into Billy Pilgrim consciousness during a performance of Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Forteresses, a sit-down theatrical narrative around the experiences of the playwright’s mother and two of his aunts before during and after the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Though Shaheman’s play notes emphasize the immigrant family experience –  if I had only notes and pictures and hadn’t seen the actual play, I would have thought it was about Shaheman himself –  his mother and aunts do all the talking. They talk about themselves and the mechanics of their lives right up to now, when they’ve become pretty much somebody’s unremarkable mom or granma or neighbor with a foreign accent. They are women of my own age, of my companion Karine’s age, of the age of most folks I know.

The mechanics of Shaheman’s mother’s and aunts’ lives come down to trying to deal with disabilities imposed on being a woman. Indeed, each woman’s story boils down to an unassuming tale of institutional, economic and sentimental dependence.

Shaheman’s mother is utterly dependent on an abusive husband and also has children to protect. One aunt has her aspirations systematically blown off by new woman-hating legislation which comes along to back up failing custom, the third is thwarted by sentimental entanglement with a blameless man.

I expect that Shaheman meant the title Les Forteresses – “Fortresses” – to allude to the rock-solid “strength” and “resiliency” of the women in the face of personal hardship and exile.

But what Billy Pilgrim heard was the women’s painful chorus of “What The Fuck?”

Because, frankly, why should one expect to be blocked and punished at every turn for what one is?

Condign punishment for existing was just not the expectation in the post-war world of 1979. Not in Iran and not in the USA. Not anywhere.

I was among the last of the John Gardner-Robert Creeley literati cohort at State University at Buffalo, which was, in 1979, already then, as today, a global engineering-education hub. Many of Shaheman’s mother and aunts’ national and spiritual brothers (and just a few sisters!) were there with me, aspiring to a modern education for a modern life.

Forteresses made me understand that “I was there”, an actor in the play, when Shaheman’s mother and aunts were coming of age. I believed then, as they believed, that women’s equality, like racial equality, like human equality, was a given of modernity.

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Agnès Mellon

All of us were carried along by the warm wind of revolution and naïve positivism.

Virtually no Iranian could imagine then that the lightning flashes of woman-hating were not just throwbacks to an atavistic “medieval Islam”, soon to dissipate in the sunshine of modernity. In the USA, I was not alone to think that egregious fanatic Phyllis Schlafly was a throwback, the fears of unisex toilets and the failure of the ERA, a joke, all a tribute to a sad, but dying, Christian atavism.

I explained away the Iran regime's obvious woman-hating then as “decolonization”, “national-religious” assimilation of the “fact of modernity”.

I was as wrong and as naïve about Schlafly and her Eagle Forum movement as Shaheman’s female relatives and those mostly young men chattering to beat the band in our student union were about the revolution that Khomeini’s Islamists seized.

In the USA and in Iran, the year 1979 marked the end of passive and customary resistance to women’s equality and a turn toward the active woman hating promoted across the world today. As much as Khomeini’s revolution, the success of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum gave the impetus for active opposition to women’s equality – i.e. woman hating – as a sine qua non of  “the fact of modernity”.

So, when I actually watch the action and listen to the stories, Forteresses is about how explicitly woman hating ideology has organized and strengthened to block and turn back women’s rights since 1979.

Ruhollah Khomeini’s ideological legacy is no medieval throwback, unless, of course, I suppose  that the regime’s nuclear, ballistic and cyber weapons capabilities, without speaking of its logistics and command and control capabilities, have been plucked out of a miraculous cave just outside Qom.

Iran’s government today is ready to club and poison every woman in the country to preserve itself – it should come as no surprise that de facto allies Russia (whose imperial venture in Ukraine is blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow) and Hamas unapologetically use rape as a weapon of war.

And what is Schlafly descendant  Tucker Carlson’s flushed-face “Christian national values” if not “the fact of modernity” without woman’s equality? In 21 states of the USA a woman may not freely dispose of her body; there is still no ERA...  

In 2024, woman hating is the name of their game wherever we live. No mistake.

___

The performers Shady Nafar, Guilda Chaverdi, Mina Kavani interpreted, accompanied and gave voice to Gurshad Shaheman’s mother and aunts at the 6 February 2024 performance of Shaheman’s Forteresses at Théâtre de la Bastille. Theirs was a profoundly Tralfamadorian performance. Nafar, Chaverdi and Kavani manage to crystallize, universalize and make timeless the vulnerability, discrimination and personal stagnation inflicted by inequality based on gender. A special shout out to Shady Nafar, whose empathic interpretation and rhetorical skill moved me especially deeply.

Silvia Gribaudi: Jump bigly! Monstrous revenge and the mystifications of age [By Tracy Danison]

“R.OSA” with Claudia Marsicano, by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Laila Pozzo

Ideas will get into the air. No sooner do I start thinking about criticism and difference (Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference), then all sorts of complexities wink on in the gloom: era, psychic construction, typology… you name it.

For instance, when I was a kid, there was still a Fat Lady at the local fair, a friendly monster… (Who, by the way, didn’t seem so very fat to me, just poor, while the uber-bellied Muscle Man surely was fat. His strength was all in the hollow barbells). Also, I realize that I seem to have been seeing my aging pretty much as deliquescence: I’m a wrinkling Captain Willard, waning with each vital breath as, all around, the jungle waxes hungry.

What’s the mission? What’s the mission?

Under cover of Christophe Martin’s Faits d’Hiver 2024 program, with performances of Grand Jeté, a new piece, and R.OSA, a classic, creator Silvia Gribaudi made a planned release of thornier perspectives for both age and body at Théâtre des Abbesses.

Gribaudi’s R.OSA twists the scrawny neck of my remembered Fat Lady friendly monster narrative. She doesn’t sweep her away as incorrect or supply me an updated version. She fixes her permanently in the corner of my eye, as a pense-bête.

Performer Claudia Marsicano, body mass deformed by obesity, balances delicately on tiny feet, gestures with tiny hands. The adipose swell of her thighs presents a baby-smooth bulging sex to me. Marsicano, between a gorgeous warble and well-meaning, no doubt healthy, weight-reducing, series of shared exercises, creates a sort of revenge porn that flays off the moral high ground and stuff a body can intellectually snatch at as she neutrally self-affirms: I am not just more out of control and weaker and stiffer than this fatso Claudia Marsicano, my thinking is cloudy, too.

R.OSA ends with a rendition of Brittney Spears’ Toxic – eminently danceable for Marsicano. But not for me. Marsicano also manages to capture the inscrutable doubleness of the song’s video. Abbesses was not full – it seemed to me younger people were more absent. Like me, they were afraid, I guess, either of dealing with the Fat Lady monster issue or with having to submit to a possible failure in a satire of it.

Age! Niagara Falls! Slowly I write, and step by step, inch by inch, I get up to … Gribaudi’s Grand Jeté. Jeté is ballet jargon for “jump”. Grand is “big”. Tone is important. Grand Jeté is vaudeville not comedy, parody, not farce.

The parody features the MM Contemporary Dance Company, a company so good and so full of zest and energy that it put me in mind of the wonderful gusto of Hofesh Schechter. But without the gangland-murder-on-the-Basel-zubringer affect.

“Le Grand Jeté” by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Andrea Macchia

With preternatural teamwork, MM Company do everything from classical hip hop to girly ballet-school twirls to buck and shake a joyful Gribaudi choreography that boils down to a variety show with singalong and acts explained (why?) in embarrassed euro English interspersed with pidgin French and a little muttered Italian.

Silvia Gribaudi, not MM Dance, however, dressed for middle-aged dumpy, makes the show, highlights the company’s excellence, makes the audience laugh. She’s the disabused host of Yugoslav state television’s Saturday Singalong (you can see her trying to gauge how she can get by on inertia and expectations; there’s a lot of confused applause and participative false starts). Part of it is just the charming lost-ness of a good clown assuming the well-worn embarrassment trope. The Old Girl is tiredly game for it: she struggles to twist, bend and crimp up with the company’ lithe young assassins. Gribaudi (pretends to tire?) tires quickly, lets go, her expressions (are meant to?) comment her fatigue, the strain of entertaining.

At a certain moment everyone takes off their top. All fold an arm over their breasts; Gribaudi, though, has very big breasts. Not so easy to hold. And, quite suddenly, I realize that – even if I could see that she has been hamming it up, there’s no way a dance performer of Gribaudi’s experience would be such a dead mackerel – every bit of her out-of-place-ness is because of what she is: gotten older but not because she’s old. And it’s not so much that she’s out of place but that there isn’t a place for old, just for the play acting of age and its problems. At least, there isn’t if all you mean to do is Jump Bigly! …

In Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, the first victim of Alex and his droogs is an old drunk. The drunk is a sort of Don Juan figure: he not only survives (a fierce kicking), his song becomes motif: “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it's no world for an old man any longer…”

So, what are we all doing here? Out of place? Or playing at it? What’s the mission? Is it funny?

“The Power of the Fragile”: When Jocasta says “no” quid Oedipus? [By Tracy Danison]

“The Power of the Fragile” by Mohamed Toukabri. Photo © Christian Tandberg

The last time I saw my mother she was in a hospice bed, barely alive; I can’t remember the year. I grabbed her hand, muttered “Bye, Ma”, left the room, drove to the airport. The last, and perhaps only, time I remember my mother hugging me as an adult was in 1973, when I left the house for good. I can still hear the screen door slam behind me.

Although I regret nothing – all things considered, I feel these memories as perfectly in-performance. They are sad goodbyes; they represent the supposed pudeur – the profound emotional reticence – of the culture I grew up in. And to tell the truth I’ve always thought there’s something profound and true in that reticence.

But I started to wonder about that a few days ago, when, my brain a-churn, I staggered out of the auditorium and into the foyer in the wake of a performance of Mohamed Toukabri’s The Power of the Fragile.

Fragile boils down to the story of the separation of Toukabri and his mother; early in life, Toukabri got a dance scholarship in Belgium and until this production his mother has not been permitted to visit him there.

To tell the story, mother and son – easy, tender, respectful – dance, hold and regard each other for about an hour. Speaking a mix of Arabic and French, Toukabri shows his mom around the performance space, introduces her to spectators, teaches her some useful English stagecraft words; together they find music that talks to Mimouna’s dance (she wanted to be a dancer but couldn’t).

Mimouna Khamessi sits on a little stool to tell us her story. As she talks, son Mohamed shows off his moves – gives a little visual biography of his artistic evolution. Toukabri talks of growing up and taking wing in a society “where you can be who you want”. He talks up his European citizenship. Near the end of the show, he costumes Mimouna as “Statue of Integration”.

It was the ease and respect that set my brain a-churn, sent me staggering out of the auditorium.

“The Power of the Fragile” by Mohamed Toukabri. Photo © Christian Tandberg

All that touching, all that tenderness!

I was not alone in psychic churn, either. I caught the eye of a woman friend not so much younger than me. Her brain was achurn, her voice a bit husky, too.

Someone later suggested that our, the, churn and stagger came down to a confrontation between very different cultures, the one, fat and warm, my, our, own, lean and chill.

But I think the real confrontation is between my latent beliefs and my newer ones, represented by Toukabri, who talks of Europe as a place where every body can be who they want; that’s to say, a liberal order of equals. But, deep down, I still entertain a belief in what Freud described as the Oedipus Complex – a latent fear that a good boy like me will use mother as a sex toy. This particular discontent and the psychic barriers it generates gets Civilization, capital “C”, going and keeps it afloat.

If you ask me if I think that, I’ll cry balderdash and say, not since 1980, at least. The real clash then is between my latent belief that Civilisation will crumble if I stop assuming that Oedipus wants to fuck his mom and my idea that every body should of right be what they want.

Here’s the nub. When all is said and done, what Oedipus is turns on who Jocasta is. Since all respect in the Oedipus Complex turns on station, not person, Oedipus, the frightened boy, is on top, near the gods who guide his destiny. On the other hand, Jocasta’s station is near the bottom: a (probable child) bride thrust into a dynastic marriage. She dutifully hands her newborn Oedipus over to her husband. The husband, also King, can murder it and perhaps avoid a sad fate for himself. Jocasta’s station is the bottom one: if Oedipus and the King can’t avoid fate, they can say “no”, because she’s meant as a uterus, Jocasta can’t; she a “does” among “haves” not to be mistaken for a “be”.

His mother just another cipher with a cunt, Oedipus can never be far from the incest he has built Civilization to avoid.

But why should all that apply to me, inspire churn in me? After all, in the civilization I (and Toukabri) believe in, Jocasta is a person – she can say “no”.

So why do I cling to the fears of Oedipus?

That question is the churn and stagger inspired in me by the respect and tenderness of Fragile. What happens to Oedipus – and to all my fellow frightened boys and our girl fellow travelers, too – when Jocasta is, is a person? … When Civilization falls, quid this Oedipus who writes? Do I lose my place? …

So, maybe it all does come down to a culture war – between my newer, truer hopes and my (unexamined) beliefs.

Mohamed Toukabri makes wonderful dance performance.

_________

I saw “The Power of the Fragile” by Mohammed Toukabri in collaboration with his mother, Mimouna (Latifa) Khamessi, featured in the Faits d’Hiver 2024 selection, at Théatre de la Bastille, 26 January 2024. A special warm nod of admiration for Diane Fourdrignier, whose insight and professionalism shine out from her dramaturgy!

Both mother and son were born in Tunisia. Before deciding to marry during a family visit to Tunis, Ms. Khamessi worked in Italy. She subsequently allowed her Italian residency rights to lapse and has never, until the production of Fragile, been able to obtain a visitor’s visa. At 15, Toukabri, got a dance scholarship for a school in Belgium; he went on to study and dance with, notably, Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker. He is now, he says, a “European citizen” (naturalized Belgian) Until recently, when she was hired as part of the cast of this production, Ms. Khamessi could never get a visitor’s visa.

Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference [By Tracy Danison]

“WHIP” by Georges Labbat. Photo © David Le Borgne

Festival Every Body, at Carreau du Temple between 9 and 13 February, bills itself as dance, performance and material art focused on the human body, the one behind the eyes and arranged by the clothes.  For the festival’s producers and sponsors, this body is the theater of the cultural mind, a place to put difference on display and let spectators and participants consider how bodies are culturally appropriated.

Participating creators are savvier, more professional and imaginative than even. If the previous two Every Body festivals foreshadow this third, performances will be especially well-thought-through and well-executed. Names include: Julien Andujar, Collectif Famille Maraboutage, Valeria Giuga, Kamilė Gudmonaitė, Marta Izquierdo Muñoz, Benjamin Kahn, Georges Labbat, Nach, Sylvain Riéjou, Alexandre Roccoli and Nina Vallon. In fact, looking at the list, I’m wondering if 2024 won’t be the year Every Body hits its stride as a project …

“Long Play Senior” by Alexandre Roccoli. Photo © Mehdi Berkouki

Discovering difference – gender, age, color, ability, sexuality – highlights much that is subtle and tough, obvious and sweet, also funny, about our cultures and perceptions. The process works by edging right up on to what a body may have thought absurd and playing it out.

For instance. Everybody, Every Body, more or less, has tits.

Right? So, we say, “man-tits”? Why “man”? Why not just “tits”? Why not “woman-tits”?

Well, because gendering suggests that if I, a man, say “My tits”, I’m jokingly complaining (sadly, in an unmanly way) about how fat I’ve become with appetite that doesn’t seem to age with me. Thus, “man tits” instead of “tits”.

Were I, on the other hand, of the woman persuasion, of original socio-biological condition as may have been, aging as fatly as may be, talking tits would be a far more complex, even dangerous, proposition.

“The World Was On Fire” by Nina Vallon. Photo © Mireille Huguet

As a “star”, for example, “tits” as subject or object, big or otherwise, might very well signal that grabbing a body’s pussy is fine work if the grabber is entitled to it; a grabber’s disappointment might well get a body a good, sound raping behind a ready-to-wear rack.

So, as I say, discovering difference highlights the subtle and tough, obvious and sweet. It’s also funny.

This time, though, I think I will go to Festival Every Body to get beyond discovering difference.

There are a couple of things that make me think redoing my critical eyes might be a good idea: the quality of Every Body 2024’s featured creators, a performance at Every Body 2023 called SHOMMES XY by Julie Lamoine and a chat I had with my Son on a lingering evening last July – our first after quite a long while.

From early days, a chat with my Son has been very much like a chat with Gargantua.

My Son asked me what, exactly, beyond currently “obvious physical differences” such as gender or skin color, what is “difference” and why do I believe something is “different” or the “same”? “Seems to me, Dad”, says this child of a new paradigm, “Most ‘difference’ is either obvious or desirable for the spectators “discovering” it or just too personal to make part of critical scrutiny.”

“Je badine avec l'amour” by Sylvain Riéjou. Photo © Jef Rabillon 

In other words, my Son suggests, who but the bribed judge treasures unequal treatment under law? Who but the psychopath embraces cruelty? Who but the charlatan claims to know the celestial mechanics of a tender heart? “The obvious, desirable and personal don’t really count for much in the big picture, Dad” he said, gulping down his pint before concluding, “If they did, there would be no bribed judges, cruelty or charlatans. Right?”.

Julie Lamoine’s SHOMMES XY featured a Down syndrome performer who was neither added into the performance nor a central part of the theme, but rather just another part in the whole performance, like a non Down syndrome performer. How the devil did she work that one out, Julie Lamoine?

In thinking about Lamoine's good trick, I realized that, ordinarily, I judge from a whole performance, the synthesis of movement in time – flow, sensibility, experience –  outward towards the particular contributions – choreography, cast, scene –  but with SHOMMES XY I focused so automatically and persistently on the Down performer that I noticed that Julie Lamoine had choreographed the difference theme in her piece so that I was forced to think more about what I do ordinarily in terms of measuring a piece of work than what I do when discovering difference.

“Dioscures” (Twins) by Marta Izquierdo Muñoz. Photo © JMC2

Finally, in looking at the creators and performances on offer for Every Body 2024, I think I see working with “difference” to make art rather than using art to represent difference – in the manner of Julie Lemoine. I know virtually all this year’s creators for work other than what will be presented at the Festival. This gives me critical reference points and guard rails as I think about and measure their work.

So, to sum it up, the knot I’d like to helplessly pick at this year is the link between what my Son called “obvious difference”, with all its socioculturopolitical baggage, and the origami of infinite difference that is the envelope and substance of both art and the individual. 

For my other appreciations of difference see “About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2022 or  “Imagine “Guérillères”: gender and the warring spirit”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2021

Dancing history, art and color to another state of mind [By Tracy Danison]

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d’Isenheim”, Musée d’Unterlinden. Photo © Cie Callicarpa

 

The retable d’Isenheim, the “Isenheim altarpiece”, is made up of three folded layers that open out to depict scenes of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with ordinary disease, suffering, anguish and death. Visually, the presence of Saint Anthony, a healer-hero in the Catholic-Christian pantheon and the symptoms of “Saint Anthony’s Fire” – ergot poisoning and plague: carbuncles, gangrenous swelling, madness, convulsed death – create a thematic unity.

In 1277, religious from the order of Saint Anthony set up an ergot poisoning and plague specialized hospital in “Isenheim” (nowadays written “Issenheim”). Isenheim was then, Issenheim is now, part of a string of upper-Rhine river towns, pretty much equidistant from Colmar to the north and Mulhouse to the south, all three anchored by Basel in Switzerland and Strasburg in Alsace.

Though a mere village, Issenheim retains some of its old-time shine: Prince Albert of Monaco is hereditary Lord there. Centrally located on trade routes, “Issenheim” is today in wine country but Isenheim was then in rye-growing land and, because ergot molds are especially common in rye and there was a great deal of human passage, Saint Anthony’s Fire was a big problem.  No surprise, the hospital did a booming business and came to hold many treasures, among them, the altarpiece. Painted for its chapel, the piece is a dramatically unique example of bright and colorful Renaissance painting: beautiful, visually ingenious, also shocking, revolting. New Science burgeons in the gorgeous horror, too. The lesions, carbuncles and convulsions featured are as medically realistic as disgusting.

Looted from the hospital during the French Revolution, the retable d’Isenheim is now dismounted as a separate exposition in the Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar.

And that would be that –  place, time, a little O-wow-did-you-know?! commentary – if not for Aurelie Gandit’s dance performance, meant to “open the regard, make the eye listen”.

For me, it opened a portal on a state of mind that, unless, of course, I’m concealing a lately personally accepted obscure form of first-century CE judeo-gnosticism, has long since passed away.

 

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d'Isenheim". Photo © Cie Callicarpa

The altarpiece’s Crucifying Jesus, Aurélie Gandit’s dance let me see, expertly anatomic, covered in scientifically accurate sores, is not a stern reminder of death from the unbending universal father. It is not either a commentary on the redemptive power of suffering. It is not either, as often explained today, a reminder of the universal god’s love.

Rather, that crucifying god, is a consolation by a brother, a fellow-sufferer, a sibling. Jesus is an agonizing inmate of Isenheim, just another sufferer in among the over-large family of a doting mother and a distant, if glorious, father.

Accepting pain, I realize, were no act of faith: plague-ridden Crucifying Jesus is a god like me. Anguished, we both face the gorgeously explicit horror of Saint Anthony’s Fire. Gods the Father might be out, but we little gods, Jesus and I and the other patients and the monks and the attendants are in it together, not alone.

Although Gandit’s performance notes say that she uses her body to project the strength of emotion in achieving her result, that is not my experience, or for that matter, my companion, Karine’s, either.

Though it has many figures, and notwithstanding sado-masochistic iconography, the experience of pain is just too personal to have an esthetic. Also, emotion may follow or precede pain but doesn’t seem to me (or us) to inhabit it – pain is deaf, dumb, dull, timeless, empty. I (or we) live inside pain.

To enable this other and more ancient state of mind in me, Gandit’s movement just tore a little hole in the fabric of routine.

Like an ordinary guide, she begins by describing the historic and symbolic and liturgical and esthetic ins and outs of the altarpiece. But there’s a flatness or lack of artifice to her. And her voice speeds up slightly. Her gesture becomes a little frenetic. She’s like a poor actor trying to play “hysteria”. She becomes absurd.

Then, all of a sudden, she falls to the ground.

And, when she falls to the ground, it’s a shock.

A little shock, but all shocks are a shock, are a breech in perceptual routine. And a little shock “open[ed my] regard, ma[de my] eye listen.”

__________

For another view of the experience of Aurélie Gandit’s dance performance with hisotircal artwork, see “Conundrums and sweet embrace: Aurélie Gandit’s “Visite dansée” with La Dame à la licorne”, The Best American Poetry, July 2022.

Performance revealed: movement, un-narrative and the silent beginnings of Imagination [by Tracy Danison]

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

“The important thing is to move.”

- Resident of Kiev explaining why he took his girls skating despite ongoing missile strikes, National Public Radio (USA), 1 January 2024

I saw The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by the Australia troupe Back to Back at Théâtre de la Bastille a few weeks back.

Seeing Shadow at Bastille is part of a larger project of mine.

Bastille came into new management after 25 years in 2023 (Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results). New broom sweeps clean, as they say, so I think this is a good time to follow Bastille’s theatrical program and through it, try to clarify what I mean by “performance” as opposed to “dance” or “play”.

I already think, along with many others, that there’s a “movement art”. From my experience, “performance” is a variation around movement art. When I say “movement art” or “performance”, I mean a live, in-person, essentially creative, public activity. Creative movement activity is tightly associated with visual and, to a lesser extent, sound and other outside and interpersonal stimulation.

I use “Dance (capital D)” to reference movement art; the “capital D” because I am inclined to think Dance is the first art, the Art from which the others stem.

Stemmed from Dance, I use “performance” as shorthand for at least three activities: “performance art”, performance around visual(ized) material; “performance theater”, performance stemming out from theatrical tradition; “dance performance”, stemming out from dance tradition… that is, from every form and genre called “dance”, from Louis XIV ballets de cours to Fabrice Ramalingom’s Frérocité (“Brotherly Ferocity”), set to premier at the end of January 2024.

 

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

I believe that for most creators, (contemporary) performance has its origins in the “open interpretations” of modern and contemporary visual art. I don’t think, for instance, that the currently active and excellent theater performance creator Nathalie Béasse is alone to have begun as a sculptor (Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal). Also, for instance, the visual artist Yves Klein and those around him early wind up associating their material (visual) art production with the performance around it.

An affirmation of the notion of movement as the first art and a clear idea of “performance” and its utility to and effects on me and on others gets me nearer to succeeding, at least in my own mind, a confluence of art and science, a better knowledge for achieving better quality art, better health - especially psychic health – and a better understanding of my existential situation.

What is the nature of live, in-person movement? Why is so craved and so feared?

Then there are contemporary questions: Is on-line interaction really “interaction”? For instance, much “psychotherapy” is now being offered by video link – how is therapy changed when in-person “interaction” is reprocessed and re-made by a technology based on a phenomenon known to independently affect consciousness? How much of psychotherapy is actually physical presence and interaction. How much is talk? Is on-line psychotherapy still psychotherapy?

Most of all, however, I believe from my life experience that the experience of live, In-person Dance in any form is a key to empowering transformation, “changing the narrative”.

 

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

 

Most research money in science is spent cracking open stuff to see what’s inside, but what matters for the stuff itself (and, being essentially stuff caught up in stuff myself, for myself) is the choreography of it all, that is, the movements and arrangements of said stuff in space. Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy rightly observes that any savage can dance. He does not note that the bright ones among them become the world’s choreographers, arranging stuff to do everything from dance performance to fly death-ray equipment up to the moon. I expect he was too hot and bothered by the subtle perfume of Lizzie Bennet and her light-steppin’ wriggle.

Santé, Bonheur! Some performance, people and places suggestions for your Paris project [By Tracy Danison]

Natali Broods, Peter Van den Eede, “Le Nouvel Homme”, cie De Hoe, Théâtre de la Bastille, October 2023. Photo © Koen Broos

The other day I saw a performance called Mémé (“Gramma”) by Sarah Vanhee at Théâtre de la Bastille. One thing that came across to me during it was how much fearing pleasure and justifying unhappiness has made sense of the ordinary misery of a northern European’s life: everyman a drunk corporal, everywoman a souring womb. My grandparents were all born in the 19^th century and hers in the 20^th, but spot on, Sarah Vanhee.

For Chrissakes, us, from now on: Enjoy pleasure.

Just a few days after Mémé, I, or, rather, my woman-friend, was invited to have a glass of wine with some people I will now make sure become friends – good wine and free wine, too, with nibbling stuffs so tasty that, to keep myself from untoward gobbling, I squeeze-held Karine’s hand. Still not tied to a bed at the aged-pauper care unit, she says I should be careful not to publicly bare untoward appetite, just in case. She also says that accidentally putting on your underpants backwards means you will get a present – says it’s a French folk belief (and won’t work if I do it on purpose).

Friendly in her manner, easy in her regard, our host raised her glass.

Santé, Bonheur! she cried, clinking her glass against her partner’s.

She managed (to at least seem) to look each of us, sincerely, in the eye. 

Health, Happiness. Eliza Doolittle. A room somewhere. Warm feet. Warm hands. Tracy Danison. Nadine’s Persian-style rice. Ahmed’s Accras – des bons! Ma’s Blackberry pie. Something to occupy the eye and the mind.

To all and everyone, then: Santé, Bonheur!  Health, Happiness!

Wait for it. Imitatio hostessa geniala: what follows is my way of sincerely looking each one of you in the eye, or seeming to, and of making suggestions for fleshing up and strengthening your Paris project (NB: everyone who reads this has one) even if you’re still waiting on the Kairos of it.

I’ll stick to things I’ve already experienced, things that I know that, whether you will or will not like them or not at the tasting, you will be able to appreciate: see to the heart of the thing.

And, since it’s only December, in the spirit of my genial host, and in order to have the pleasure of offering more presents later on, I offer only things that endure or repeat in Winter and early Spring. Roughly, from Christophe Martin’s penultimate Faits d’Hiver dance performance program to Petter Jacobsson’s and Thomas Caley’s premier of their creation Instantly Forever at the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy.

That’d be middle January to middle March, 2024.

I made first acquaintance with the genial host through her open table and good wine. I commence my suggestions with a suggestion for giving.

 

Sarah Vanhee, “Mémé”, Théâtre de la Bastille, November 2023. Photo © Bea Borges

Regard du Cygne is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024. Founded by Duncan dancer, American expat, choreographer, theater manager and mother Amy Swanson and her late husband Alain Salmon, the Belleville landmark is publishing a book to mark the occasion. Regards Partagés will feature the voices of the many past and present dancers and choreographers who have benefited from the studio’s material and spiritual support. Make an ongoing donation to Association Musique Danse XXème, Regard du Cygne’s dedicated support organization. Help them publish and prosper and pursue their Paris projects. I do.

The gift yourself or gift another whose Paris project dreams are dear to you with dance.

Off the top of my head, you can hook up with Regard du Cygne, of course, but also Micadanses or Atelier de Paris – there’s professional training with the likes of Peter Goss or Su Jeong Kim or Liz Santoro or Ruth Childs or Loïc Touzé or Tatiana Julien, but also workshops for everybody, kids, adults, beginners.

La Fabrique de la Danse has put together a unique business-like approach to dance performance with four training programs for would-be creative entrepreneurs: Programme Chorégraphe, for developing choreographers and dance companies; Manager de projets chorégraphiques et artistiques, setting up and managing creative projects; Sur la Route, going international with a dance project; and Lancer son projet artistique, launching your creative project. Click on the link above or write [email protected] or call + 33- 1 84 79 45 34.

If your Paris project Kairos is immanent, that is, if you’re actually in Paris in Winter 2024, stretch and strengthen the pleasure of being there with: join me in following the doings of the Théâtre de la Bastille or even in just thinking about the sense of live performance theater and theater performance. I am using the 2023-2024 season at Bastille to get a sense of 40-something new director Claire Dupont’s artistic and esthetic direction: within the sense of her art and esthetics is a broader in-process generation change – gender, culture, all that.

In addition to quality theater performance pieces coming up to rival wonderful stuff like Mémé or Le Nouvel Homme orBlind Runner or The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, Bastille has upcoming dance by contemporary-krumper Nach, (re-?)doing her first piece, Cellule, as a sort of repertory piece, and two choreographers I don’t know, Laura Bachman, Ne me touchez pas, and Mohamed Toukabri, The Power of the Fragile.

Also, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet lately for Jean Christophe Boclé.

I think you should, too; increase your joy and good humor quotient through esthetic experience. Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’automne 2023 program featured a public rehearsal of his newest work ...est au delà... (“… beyond…“). The piece is there with a truly moving live sound weave of honors to Chopin and Webern by pianist and composer Orlando Bass. I discussed the fine depth of Boclé’s work last year (More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects", Jean-Christophe Boclé). I wrote him into “the camp” of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – as in them, there’s science in Boclé: sounds and patterns (not “words” and “music”), genetics, electromagnetisms, quantum foams. That’s to say, he seems to know how the use the organic complexity and function of real bodies, the neurology shared by performers and spectators alike, in dance performance.

Join with me in anxiously waiting for a ...est au delà... premier sometime somewhere soon; I find anxiety smooths out the usual worry about the Malabar Front and the chocolate ration.

 

Scott Price and Sarah Mainwaring, “The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes”, Back to Back Theatre Co., Théâtre de la Bastille, December 2023. Photo © Kira Kynd

Being here with, you should look to experience the 2024 Faits d’hiver program; just subscribe for the whose caboodle – 15 January to 9 February and all over the Paris region; it’s the next to last Faits before a … change of guard? … I don’t know. Nobody does – beyond his country-house dream that, to my mind and thus far, resembles a bit a Paris project, I’m not sure Christophe Martin, founder and director of Micadanses as well as Faits, does either.

In his presentation of this year’s program – which features eight premiers, almost two-thirds of performances, by the way –  Martin underlined the importance of place in this year’s doings: physical space plus movement.

Always practical, Martin points first to big-cast productions such as Fabrice Ramalingon’s Frérocité or Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Ne Lâchons rien! (“Hang strong!”) the third part of his age-and-dance performance triptych, Bêtes de scène. You need stage volume for that!

But place is apparently also atmosphere, or, maybe something else… a right space? Above, I mentioned Nach’s doing her primordial Cellule at the Théâtre de la Bastille. If I understand Martin’s theory, the Théatre de la Bastille is the right place to observe Nach’s “growth” – Nach was just a kid when she made and did Cellule.

There are layers to this space and place stuff: Nach may have grown from a kid, but she is now a woman, a known choreographer of a hybridization of contemporary dance and hip hop that was then just her primordial approach to dance performance. That’s something the right space has to take account of. Right? Nach’s also there with Laura Bachman and Mohamed Toukabri, who are also part of the Faits d’hiver program and who are and which is also what you might call Bastille’s Claire Dupont’s own Paris project.

There are spaces and places within spaces and places within places and spaces here.

 

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

In a Paris project – whether in-waiting or in Kairos – getting out into the country and getting away from all the places and spaces within spaces and places layers can be essential to mental stability.

So, let me suggest that early 2024 is a good moment for exploring space, place and time past and present. Get up to Nancy to experience the last season of Ballet de Lorraine under the direction of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley.

The couple has got some of the best performance with their company that I’ve seen.

I’m especially looking forward to seeing what that means for Instantly Forever, effectively, their goodbye to Nancy.

They have surrounded themselves (and, it seems to me, their creative processing, too) with creators Marco da Silva Ferreira, Joachim Maudet and Ayelen Parolin. These three will work together with the Ballet’s performers to create surprise “hors d’oeuvres”. Repertory includes recent work by Maud Le Pladec and Alan Linder, both sort of “reality dance” creators, along with Trisha Brown’s Twelve Ton Rose.

Marco da Silva Ferreira is a choreographer who, if his C.A.R.C.A.S.S is any indicator, is minded to always get to the essentials of dance performance experience: in terms of style and genre, he just takes what he needs in service of effect. Da Silva Ferreira started out life as a psychologist; he’s wound up making interesting performance moments. In addition to the hors d’oeuvre, da Silva Ferreira is putting together a piece he calls a Folia (“Revelry”), around ecstasy. I saw Da Silva Ferreira’s C.A.R.C.A.S.S during the Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne this past Spring 2023,

Although Joachim Maudet and Ayelen Parolin have very distinctive styles and, perhaps, performance-experience aims, I find there’s a certain shared légèrté in the approach of both. I can be sure that whatever they come up with for their hors d’oeuvres will be fun and surprising. Beyond that, I can’t guess.

Parolin, like da Silva Ferreira, will be presenting a creation he calls Malón (“Crowd”) – it’s their first time working with a whole troupe (the Ballet de Lorraine has 24 members). I saw Ayelen Parolin’s popular WEG at the Atelier de Paris’ June Events 2020 and Joachim Maudet trying out a performance concept at Etoile du nord in 2022 and his Welcome at Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’automne 2022.  

Santé. Bonheur.

Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Songlines” by Marco Berrettini. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The Ballet de Lorraine opened its 2023-2024 season at the beginning of November with Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques (“Mountains: ambiance dances”) and Marco Berrettini’s Songlines (“Dream tracks”), both of them visually lovely and perceptually stimulating.

“Visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” makes me think how much more like science than esthetics dance experience is. More like peering through a telescope than, say, a kaleidoscope.

For a telescope, you’ve got to acquire a steady hand and agile eye before you can see anything at all. Whatever you discover after learning not jiggle is dependent on previous experience from within and without yourself, along with intense, very fragile and very fickle observation. Watch out! Looking for god-knows-what one deep winter’s night in Upstate New York, my Dad got lost up there and got frost bite.

After seeing Danses atmosphériques and Songlines, I had the good luck to chat informally over dinner with Petter Jacobsson, the Ballet’s director, and Thomas Caley, the artistic researcher. Jacobsson and Caley are a life couple. Beyond their affinities, Jacobsson has been insistently, consistently and publicly affirming Caley’s role as his indispensable creative partner throughout his more than 10-year tenure at the Ballet.

After about half hour’s sit down with Caley, I understood Jacobsson on both heads.

The 2023-2024 season in Nancy is the last for the creative couple. Instantly forever is the working title of their goodbye piece. It opens on 7 March 2024 and runs until the 12 March 2024 at the Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy, with Marco da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia, also a new creation, sharing the bill.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Speaking of Instantly forever, Songlines, Mountains and personal and creative partnerships, and by the way, my thanks to Robert Weissberg. He was an assistant professor at Skidmore College. Back in 1972, he gave me boxes of books to take along to the Army with me.

When he gave me them, he said that taken together the books pretty much made up the sum total of a liberal education for our times. I’ve discovered that’s pretty much true, too; Hegel and Vico are pretty much in the ballpark on politics and history, Candide pretty much on life and Jung pretty much on experience. To add to this existing knowledge, during supper, Caley & Jacobsson recommended David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book begins with a quote from the Undiscovered Self: something like, the moment is right for a change of civilizations.

In my small experience of it, Caley & Jacobsson’s choreographic work has two striking features, which I should tell you about to fog up your telescope if you chance to see Instantly Forever.

The first feature is an un-narrative concern around what we call “time”. The second feature is…  – I want to say executed individuation of the choreographic artists involved, viz., Jung, viz., Dawn.  This want-to comes down to saying that, so far, walking away from any Ballet de Lorraine performance, I feel like I’ve seen each artist – experienced something beyond words that honors the un-narrative they are mapping for the choreography designer and spectators.

I can sum up my experience of Jacobsson & Caley’s work this way. At the core are firmly-grasped – “un-narrative” or “movement-only” – themes (such as “time”), and a thought-through choreography shared, shaped and executed by trusted fellow artists on a visually pleasing set.

So, no surprise that “visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” is my take on Berrettini’s Songlines and Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques. Jacobsson & Caley hired them, after all.

Berrettini’s dance note makes Songlines seem like there’s some civilizational or even political story in the dance, which at first put me off – dance and politics hardly ever can mix for me. Previously known to me for meta-satire performance, Berrettini writes that he crafted the choreography after reading Bruce Chatwin’s spiritual travelogue, The Songlines. He also cites the odd coincidence of the farmer’s eternal dissatisfaction with an imperfect world and the nomad’s satisfaction with a perfect one.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

It turns out, though, that the choreographer is just coming to grips with “space” through the complex tradition of Australia’s first peoples’ space-time maps – called “songlines”. Berretini’s approach is to recall the first peoples’ successful concept to support a dance experience of his movement-only theme: space.

His choreography gets at it first by visual separation then by encounter and group actions. In the opening movement, the artists, all dressed in light-sensitive pastel colors, enter the set together from a single off-center point.

I experience them as spreading over the set space like a (lapping) tide on a beach. The movement evokes the familiar defining contraries of “land, sea, horizon”, which also fills its now three dimensions with people. The set becomes a place.

With a music that minds its own business, establishing presence within a diffusely lit place, spectators see the artists variously as in one of three of five possible colors – blue, yellow, rose, green, orange – as they encounter one another, establish a flow of meeting, take on personality, individuate. And just in case a spectator is getting into a rut: a sudden rain of helium-filled rocks/meteors/turds/chocolate truffles from “above”.  Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, the spectator, a stimulating experience of the imagination of space.

With an intention to show dance as “a happy accident”, and keeping in mind that it must take a great deal of doing, Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques goes at the perception of space, too, but as “ambiance”. The challenge for Sierras’ artists is to figure spectators mountains that move spectators, or, perhaps, spectators moving figurative mountains, or both – in short, something that exists only in a body’s perception.

Di Stefano succeeds his dance with a choreography articulating around appearance and disappearance, along with continuous shading of light and (movement) energy.

In a first movement, Sierras’ intent artists, costumed in black and flesh,  pass in and out of the set space, then flow into and against each other within it, find distances, measures, relationships, limits.

As with Songlines, music that minds its own business backgrounds Sierra’s dim but changing light and tints and, especially, the artist movement. A unique red individual – a sun? – finishes a the unique and autonomous rhythm that now defines the place …  And, step right up, spectator! Experience space as place as its ambiance, its feeling, space that feels as real as a Mussorgsky Bald Mountain, a Hokusai Mount Fuji or a Richard Brautigan Big Sur! Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, spectator, quite a new ambiance.

I’ll miss having Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine at the other end of my dance telescope.

______________

Articles discussing Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine referenced above

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

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #2: a tale of sentiment and feeling [by Tracy Danison]

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine 2023-2024 performance calendar: Nancy, On Tour

François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Dance performer, choreographer and director François Lamargot says his recent “dance-theater” piece, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie, comes down to his view that our civilization has generated a “handicap of the heart” that blinds its members to the destruction it (the handicap) provokes within and around it.

When Lamargot talks about a “handicap of the heart”, he means impaired hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling of the here and now: non-development of the ordinary senses.  He thinks that when these ordinary powers are weak, the world within a body, the individual or personality, becomes a plaything of what Sting called “the poets, priests and politicians …. whose logic ties you up and rapes you”.

Without a within nourished from the ordinary senses, Lamargot thinks, a body loses herself or himself in a breathless spiral of passive reaction to the world without. Asked if J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie … is a study of the connections between us and the world or of our disconnection from it, Lamargot affirms, “Disconnection”. He says that, in the end, what he wants to suggest by showing the disconnection is that something other (than the handicapped heart and the madness) it produces is possible. He wants to get beyond discourse, to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to get across this other sensibility.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Son of a film projectionist and a stage actress, a neighborhood hip hopper with academic dance credentials, as a kid François Lamargot started acting with his mom at the now defunct Théâtre de Ménilmontant collective. He came to dance – classic, jazz and contemporary, with parallel specialties in break and house (freestyle personal expressive) – because he felt more at ease with his body. Also, he says, dancing makes him feel more able to express and show meaning.

Since his early days, Lamargot has created, performed, taught and encouraged dance performance in and from his native Paris 20ème to the Comoros Islands, from Lyon to Haiti and Gabon, from Marseille to New Caledonia.

Lamargot is intellectually and professionally in his element across the culture spectrum. He is as comfortable working on multidisciplinary career development with young people at the Jeune Ballet Européen as he is doing tailor-made creation for the reference hip-hop festivals Kalypso and Karavel.  Ethics and right action in daily life are important to Lamargot. His reference points include the principles of Taoism and the practice of the antique Zen masters Dôgen and Lin-Tsi along with the outlook of the writer Marguerite Duras and the precepts of the Argentine painter Luis Ansa and the contemporary social activist Henri Gougaud.

So, how does Lamargot get all his life experience and philosophy into a dance performance?

First off, by imagining then executing a form of dance. When I saw a first-draft production of J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais du Chaillot) in 2022,  I thought of it as “cinematized dance-theater”, even as “musical drama”. I still think that’s a pretty understandable description.

Lamargot says that, taken together, what I could experience as “musical drama” is for him a distinct genre that hybridizes hip hop and specific elements of contemporary dance, especially danse contact (“contact improvisation” or “body empathy dance”).

In any case, he says he’s been instinctively looking for points of fusion among his different dance practices all along. “Movement has no genre frontiers”, he says, adding that there is, anyhow, a lot of complementarity in dance performance figures and forms. For instance, [the foot-fluttering movement called] petite batterie in classical dance “has a rhythm that closely resembles that in house dance…”

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

These days, in any case, Lamargot doesn’t think much about the originating genre of a move or figure. He prefers to think in terms of a movement’s visual quality: “roundness, fluidity, impact, density, amplitude, explosiveness” and a movement’s effect on the spectator. 

J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … figures both dream and reality – a doubling that mobilizes Lamargot’s whole performance toolbox in the service of “showing” this sensibility of “disconnection” while holding out the possibility for another way of living.

The piece is played out on a set that recalls the feeling one has at the Palais de Glace, Baroque elegance that has lost its cultural moorings, is sliding toward hopeless forgotten-ness. What counts from there, he says, is, especially, theatricality and the astute use of video.

On set, video “translates as a mirror in which a given character also exists”.

As a genre, Lamargot observes, hip hop is powerful theatrical tool … “very forward, very much on the attack, very effective visually”. It often uses, he continues, set-piece situations to induce emotions in characters. These emotions can then be picked up by spectators as “sensibility” rather than as “story-line”.

Forms and riffs of contemporary dance provide attitude. For J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie,Lamargot is thinking in particular of danse contact. Dance contact operates around the receptive body, the body connected to its world. In the performers on stage this receptiveness, as in t’ai chi or karate, translates as strength and potentiality rather than power and action…

In the Paris region, you can catch J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie:

- 3 and 4 February 2024 at the Suresnes Cités Danse festival

Want to be among the world’s first certified choreographers? Check out La Fabrique de la Danse [By Tracy Danison]

Théophile Bensusan (l.), creation entrepreneur, dance performer, La Fabrique de la Danse, Paris. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

“Orianne Vilmer has energy”. That’s what comes to mind as I am sitting down for the chat. Maybe it’s just that her name reminds me of the excellent Oriana Fallacci, interviewer of almost all the egregious men-of-power of the 20^th century. Like Fallacci, Vilmer’s radiates that kind of natural-born energy and wit old Father William in the Lewis Carroll nursery rhyme has. I have the feeling that, if she chooses, like the unsinkable father, she can successfully clarify a quantum paradox with a bon mot while idly balancing an eel on the tip of her nose.

Indeed, there are proofs that Vilmer does have her wits about her and is, in fact, as energetic, cultivated, and capable as my first impression suggests.

After all, I am talking to her because she’s the co-founder and guiding spirit – along with the veteran choreographer and dancer Christine Bastin – of La Fabrique de la Danse (“The Dance Factory”), a Paris dance school with a unique learning proposition.

For instance, as of this writing, as far as either La Fabrique, or I, can determine, the school is the only one in Paris, in the whole world, where you can learn the ins and outs of the choreographer’s métier and get official certification for it. That’s because, as of July, France’s national skills and competences register, Répertoire national des certifications professionnelles, RNCP, has included those required in a choreographer. La Fabrique is the institution with a curriculum that meets the requirements.

 

© La Fabrique de la Danse

 

I think it’s safe to say that Vilmer is a dance performer with a scientific background and serious business experience rather than some other way around.

In her school years, she took up classic dance and earned praise and prizes for it. Then, at the Paris Conservatory, she practiced contemporary dance for two years under the eyes of teachers such as Peter Goss, Joëlle Mazet and Susan Alexander.

She then turned away from dance training to prepare for life widely, taking degrees in engineering and mathematics – France’s educative equivalents of, say, in US terms, Harvard law with a stint in a graduate school of politics. She followed on with work in international corporate management, where, among other things, she contributed proudly and personally, she says, to ESG charter projects.

While in the corporate web Vilmer successfully kept up her dance. In fact, in a recent conversation with Christine Bastin, the latter went out of her way more than once to emphasize that Vilmer is a talented dance performer and choreographer. Indeed, in December, she’ll premier M51, a dance performance for 54 persons (in which she will perform), co-written with La Fabrique associate Emmanuelle Simon, with a digital scene by Damien Serban and original music by Baptiste Lagrave. As I say, energy, wit.

In 2010, Vilmer founded the amateur dance troupe Danse en Seine, whose stated mission is to “re-invent” the concept of amateur dance and dream “ambitious dreams”. In 2013, the troupe wanted to perform Gueule de Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), Christine Bastin’s dance performance for five created for the 1992 Lyon Biennale de la danse.

That meeting seems to have been one of minds. In 2015, Vilmer and Bastin set up La Fabrique. Vilmer became president, using her energy wit and experience to do the necessary entrepreneurship and general management. Bastin became artistic director, contributing her choreography skills and experience to building and refining the school’s unique offering.

The idea of La Fabrique then, as now, was/is to turn out a “finished product”, a skilled dance performer, surely, but also a competent and efficacious creator.

It turns out that, as in many other contemporary endeavors, say, independent journalism or scriptwriting, creativity is not sufficient to a dance performer’s professional success. A body has to produce, too: administrate, manage and communicate.

When she speaks of educational goals, Vilmer says La Fabrique looks to train up “creation entrepreneurs”. She insists on, underlines, emphasizes the word “entrepreneur” as opposed to “manager”). She then describes La Fabrique as a “choreography incubator”, saying the heart of dance performance is “creation, a process very much personal to the creator, that needs to find nourishment and support from the outside” …

In other words, in choreography, it’s not just fulfilled intentions and figures that lead to success but also, as in other undertakings, people, lights, sound, stage and box office! So, even the most inner-directed dance performance auteurneeds to develop the arts of the entrepreneur: finding the resources and gaining support of others for the dance project.

A successful choreographer, Vilmer says, is a dance performance auteur who understands how to be an entrepreneur of dance creation. That’s why La Fabrique’s certification cursus aims to package it as training in “creation entrepreneurship”: understanding better how a dance performer creates, how they identify and analyze their needs and seek out the aids and supports that enable choreographic production ...  

… Why. Yes. I think so, too.

Orianne Vilmer and her La Fabrique de la Danse certainly do offer a real learning opportunity.

The pre-requisites and conditions of La Fabrique’s choreography cursus are analogous to a continuing-education MBA. For detailed information, click Fabrique de la Danse or call Ilyana Koura, the school’s personal development coordinator, during business hours (GMT+1) at (+33) 184 79 4534.

For more information on the professional status of choreographers, contact Chorégraphes Associé.e.s., France’s choreographer’s union

Figuring liberation: Margaux Amoros’ “À Cru” [By Tracy Danison]

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

… Ton message à la Grande Ourse/Et la trajectoire de la course/Un instantané de velours…

    - Noir Désir, “Le Vent Nous Portera”

I’m on the mailing list for a project called Pour un atlas des figures, (“For an atlas of figures and we don’t mean just dance steps”).

Pour un atlas is run by a movement arts scholar called Mathieu Bouvier and presents itself as tracing “the meander of lines around the radiant notion of ‘figure’, a notion at the meeting point of the philosophy of art, cultural anthropology, clinical and artistic creation”.

When a body mulls that over, it works. Although, until the other day, I used to think an atlas of figures was an absurd idea, an impossibility. To my mind, an atlas was just too physical-rational a notion and figuration and figuring a figure are just too complex and too personal to trace out and distill into the five basic steps of a YouTube tutorial.

But of course, Bouvier never suggested any such thing. I’ve just had the wrong idea. As Bouvier declares, figuration and the figure are a radiant notion and their atlas is the paths and byways from where and by which their un-narrative might be grasped or grokked.   

Pour un atlas and these considerations came to my mind the other day because I got a notice for Pour an atlas in my email and because I had just experienced, and enjoyed, too, the dance performance À Cru (“Raw”) by Margaux Amoros.

A Cru, a duo featuring herself and peer performer Jeanne Alechinsky, turned out, for me, at least, to be “all about” figure, figuring and figuration, showing them to exist in the time of an intentional, but un-narrative movement, as quantum, not as evanescent.

Amoros’ intention was:

Ayant fait le constat sans appel de leur domestication avancée, deux femmes décident de partir en quête de ce qui en elles résiste encore. «  Qui sont-elles sous les vieilles peaux mortes de leur subordination ? À quoi ressemblent-elles quand leur image se met à trembler de l’intérieur ? » Dans un espace hanté par la présence d'un musicien, elles viennent écouter la nécessité de faire alliance avec une sensualité indisciplinée. / Having understood their state of advanced domestication, two women decide to explore themselves to find that part of themselves that still resists. “Who are they under the dead skin of their subordination? What are they like when the image of themselves quakes from the inside?” In a space haunted by the presence of a musician, they listen to the need to ally themselves with a sensuality without bounds.

Here’s what I (believe I) heard and saw happen with À Cru:

A live guitar in a stage left catwalk is doing broad chords with plenty of dash and wah-wah; throughout sound rather follows or accompanies than leads movement. On stage, two women with what good old Anthony Trollope called “womanly” bodies; at center stage, clothed as womanly women, they are hand-in-hand for movements that range from jerky to moon-walky through to carefully experimental to smoother, stretchy, confident gesture.

At the point at which each of the womanly women seems to descry a distinct/defined individual dance, they loose hands to evolve in parallel.

One plants her feet and focuses her movement and emotion on her thrust-up pubis; I think of a samurai: her clitoris and upper vulva seemingly bulging, her posture and look, a “universal” figuring of “power”, “empowered”. Meanwhile, the other woman, referencing her partner by the contrast of movement, figuring her personal balance, showing herself within herself her body elegance: she stretches her limbs, projects a figuration of the place and sense of each bone and muscle within its whole.

The result is a broad figuration of the two women together gels in my eye – they share an evolved interior or exterior?

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

The duo passes into a movement of contact … In this contact, they are not so much mirrors as searcher-outers of one-another, experiencing found contact. For me, at least, the piece ends inside this crescendo of contact, without denouement:  once liberated, a body lives free, not so?

Back to Pour un atlas.

Figures, by my lights as now seen through À Cru, must necessarily be the collective biography of people figuring and figured. The figuration within that biography recreates the tissue of being-there-with, or the “un-narrative” experience, that enables the sensibility that in turn enables a spectator to enter into Imagination or, as we may say, be sensible of the quantum space a body actually inhabits.

An analogy to what I am thinking of here as “figuration” could be the visual experience of those mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, stimuli that shove the viewer into a “non-past”, say, one peopled with ineffable eternally extant personalities instead of into the “historical (or narrative) past” where each personality has some sort of role in “what happens ‘next’”.

And though Dance is the art that builds, carries and enables figuration, there are webs and webs of it in figuring ordinary life.

I am on the Pour un atlas mailing list because – well before I experienced Margaux Amoros’ À Cru and felt the force of her mastery of figuration – because of my admiration for any people who have understood that dance is the primary art. Loïc Touzé figures among very many admirable contributors of Pour un atlas; I have been in love with Touzé through my experience of his talk-memory dance, Je suis lent (“I am slow”). In my memory, for the record, the Lent I was there with rolls out in a place that photo evidence shows not to be that place or even the time of year or year of its production.  All the same, it figures true.

And what is this “love” if not a figuration of daily living, a web in a web of un-sayable figure, figuring and figuration?

Without any intention, by some ordinary quantum symbiosis or another, Touzé’s Lent figures my karmic Patronus. That is, the Down syndrome boy, strong back and sweet temper, for the term of natural life, bound hand, heart and foot to an aging industrial dishwasher. Most everybody who gets a glimpse of the bound figure are figuring it as all for the best. And that holds the bound boy down, ‘though, from time to time, a body with doubts briefly glimmers through the steam and clatter, bucking the bound boy up.

I’ve been figuring the bound boy figuration for years. He has washed many dishes for me and never said a word. Go figure.

_____________________

“À Cru” is Margaux Amoros’ first choreography, a duo It played at the Etoile du nord as part of the “Avis des turbulences” new works program. I saw it on 28 September 2023.

What is dance, what has it got to do with us and why? [By Pauline Tremblay]

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Introduction

Some years ago, I was in the habit of going to weekly public presentations on psychoanalysis. I would lose myself an hour or two in the rococo webs of a presenter’s case study, which they would lard with literary logics backed by vocal dramatics. It was an entertaining and instructive way to learn about contemporary psychoanalysis. Also, I would often hear some word or notion that would give me pause and, more than once, even make me sit up wide-eyed.

I was reminded of these experiences by Pauline Tremblay’s satirical slide-presentation performance piece, Corps social, corps dansant. The basic shtick of it is Tremblay’s presenter marching determinedly into recondite research only to wander off into an increasingly impatient detachment from the over-complex talk-talk, thus mirroring the general experience of too many real-life slide presentations. I chuckled and snickered, even guffawed, through Tremblay’s fine performance of a well-written and pretty spot-on satire.

But, from the moment the presenter explains her sense of what dance is and what it has to do with us and why – that is, almost from the very beginning of the performance –  I had a sit-up-wide-eyed experience. In my mind’s eye, a figure of a “porous self”, a self that is a vague outline set into an infinite overlap of an infinite number of porous “self-defining” outlines set against a vast coherence of being there with. It kept me sitting thoughtfully in my seat after the performance wound up, perched on my shoulder, whispered in my ear, as I rode my bike homewards.

In the text, there’s no trace of the figure of the "porous self" I describe just above.

Just after the short biography is an extract from the notes Pauline Tremblay used as both prop and script during her performance of Corps social, corps dansant, 28 September 2023, as part of Étoile du nord’s Autumn festival, Avis de turbulences. A translation into English follows Tremblay’s original text. 

Pauline Tremblay, dancer, performer, writer

With a consistent slant towards the off-beat, Pauline Tremblay’s creations straddle the frontier between performance, theater and dance, as well as between fact and fiction, the private and the public, between word and deed. Working as a dancer and performer since 2008, Tremblay trained in classical dance at Nantes and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy, esthetics, dance theory and therapy from the University of Paris 8, haut lieu of France’s post-modernist theory and analysis. Tremblay became an associate of the Gaëlle Bourges dance performance company in 2018. In addition to Corps Social, Corps Dansant, Tremblay’s recent creations include the dance performances One two One Two and Après alien. A new production tentatively entitled Trio pour une danseuse, une électroacousticienne et un.e batteur.se will see the stage in 2024. – Tracy Danison

 

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Corps social, corps dansant – Pauline Tremblay

… 2) LE CORPS DANSANT

« Dans un premier temps, de quelle danse parle-t-on ? Danse dite « primitive », « traditionnelle », « folklorique », « danse de couple », « danse moderne », « danse contemporaine », « danse de création » ... ? Et d’ailleurs, sont-elles si éloignées dans leurs approches du corps ?
L’histoire de la danse nous enseigne que c’est à partir du moment où la danse a pris conscience de sa dimension sociale et politique, c'est-à-dire que c'est à partir du moment où le corps dansant ne se résume pas aux différentes figures que traverse le danseur, qu’elle a tissé des liens avec son époque et que la danse a véritablement fait sa place parmi les autres arts.

1. Une place particulière au sein des arts

En effet, La danse est un art particulier qui ne peut dissocier le sujet de son objet :
Le danseur ne peut pas poser sa danse à côté de lui et la contempler. Le danseur fait coïncider une image intérieure, une sensation intérieure avec le regard extérieur. Et la danse émerge alors dans cet espace intermédiaire. Ainsi, autant dans sa production que dans sa réception, elle ne peut pas être en dehors du regard que l’on porte sur elle. Le corps dansant serait donc un catalyseur du corps social, du corps politique et potentiellement du corps institutionnel. Et sans doute l’art le plus à même de l’évoquer, d’en dire quelque chose.

Deux axes d'observation se dessinent : on peut se placer soit du point de vue de ce que la danse peut représenter symboliquement sur une scène en terme d’idéologie, soit du point de vue ce qu’elle comporte d’effet immédiat de par sa puissance de mobilisation kinesthésique.
Ce qu'on entend par kinesthésique  : c’est le pouvoir empathique, la façon dont chacun perçoit, en lui, par un processus de transfert et d’identification très fort, le mouvement de l’autre. Ce n'est pas du tout mystique ce que je suis en train de dire : cela a pu notamment être mis en évidence par la preuve de l'existence de neurones miroirs.

1. Le corps dansant = Le corps dansant et le corps regardant la danse“

• Le corps qui danse

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Qu’en est-il du corps dansant ? Est-ce que, parce qu’il est dansant, ce corps échappe à la contrainte sociale ? Ou est-ce une utopie ?
Le corps dansant est pris dans une dialectique de libération et de prise de pouvoir du corps social sur lui. La danse est un formidable moyen de libération individuelle et collective autant qu’un moyen de coercition individuel et collectif. 

• Avant d’être considérés comme des instruments performants, le mouvement et la danse déploient une spatialité, une temporalité, un imaginaire, des éprouvés conscients et inconscients, c’est à dire une subjectivité. Certes.
• Mais ce corps, qui cherche à s’émanciper de sa condition de base, en déjouant la gravité par exemple, s'engage bien dans une performance technique, dans la recherche d'une certaine virtuosité qui implique une maîtrise, voire un quasi dressage, du corps naturel. Donc il y a bien une dimension productiviste du corps dansant, qui implique une dépense d’énergie, un effort, un travail….
• Le corps qui regarde le corps qui danse. Comme on l’a dit, la danse est aussi indissociable de son évènementialité.Porter la danse au regard de l’autre c’est donc l’inscrire dans un espace social, public, collectif, politique. Elle pose d’emblée la question du regard du public …

Mais de quel public parle-ton?

S’agit-il d’une identité sociale, bourgeoise ou populaire ? Le spectacle instaure-t-il une entité, une communauté, un être-ensemble, une communion au sein des spectateurs ? Le lieu de la représentation devient-il un lieu de recueillement, de rassemblement, à construire ou à détruire d'ailleurs ? Ou le public reste-t-il une masse hétérogène d’individus éparses ? Avec comme seul dénominateur commun le fait d’être enfermé ici et maintenant ? "

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Translation

Corps social, corps dansant by Pauline Tremblay

… 2) THE BODY AT DANCE

First off, what dance are we talking about? “Primitive” dance, “traditional” dance, “folklore” dance, “couple” dance, “modern”, “contemporary”, “original” dance? And at that, are these so far from each other in their approach to the body?

The history of dance tells us that, from the moment when dance becomes conscious of its social and political dimension, that is, from the moment when the body at dance cannot be described by the different figures through which the dancer passes, it has become part of its time and that it has made itself a real place among the other arts.

1. A special place among the arts

Dance is an art that cannot dissociate subject from object: The dancer cannot put their dance on the floor next to them to contemplate it. The dancer aligns an interior image, an interior feeling with exterior view. And it is from the intermediate space that the alignment creates that dance emerges. Thus, as much in its production as in its reception, dance cannot exist outside its exterior perception. The body at dance, thus, is a catalyst for the body in society, the body in politics and, potentially, of the institutional body. And, doubtless, dance is the art the best placed to point to, also to comment, the body,

Two ways of looking at the body at dance emerge. We may take the point of view of either what dance may represent symbolically in a context in terms of ideology or the point of view of what dance has of immediate effect through the power of kinesthetic mobilization.

What is meant here by “kinesthetic” is empathic capacity, that is, the way in which each perceives within them self, through the very strong transfer and identification process, the movement of the other. What Is meant here has nothing of the mystical; we could easily demonstrate the validity of the process described by pointing to the existence of mirror neurons.

1. The Body at dance = the dancing body + the body looking at the dance

• The dancing body

What about the dancing body? Does it escape from social constraints because it is dancing? Or is this a fantasy?

The dancing body operates as a dialectic of liberation from and submission to the forms of body in society. Dance is as formidable a means of personal and collective liberation as it of personal and collective coercion.

• Before they can be tools, movement and dance must deploy spatial, temporal and perceptual contexts, conscious and unconscious proofs, that is, subjectivity.
• But the body, which looks to emancipate itself from its primal state by, for example, defying gravity, engages with performance technique in the search for a certain virtuosity, which implies mastery, even near domination, of the natural body. There is, thus, a productivist dimension to the dancing body, which implies, after all, energy, effort, work…
• The body that looks on the dancing body.

As has been said, dance cannot be separated from its context. Bringing dance to a spectator is to put dance into public, social, collective and political space. Off the bat it poses the question of public perception…

But what public are we talking about?

Are we talking about a bourgeois or working class social identity? Does dance performance install an entity, a community, being-together, a communion in spectators? Does the performance space become a space for mediation, for gathering; also, is it to construct or demolish? Or do spectators remain a heterogeneous mass of scattered individuals with the sole common denominator being to be shut in together in a particular here and now? – Tracy Danison

NEMO Paris: what’s up with digital art? [By Tracy Danison]

“Play with the Earth”. NeoConsortium's “ExoForm”, the first sidereal art project, will eventually cover the whole world in breathtaking pink glass. In the end, spokespeople enthuse, all humanity will get to see this weary old planet through rose-colored glasses. Photo © Quentin Chevrier/Biennale Némo 2023

25 years and my life is still/Tryin' to get up that great big hill of hope…And I, I am feeling a little peculiar … And I scream from the top of my lungs, "What's going on?"

What's Up, 4 Non Blondes, 1993

Je est un autre (Arthur Rimbaud: ”I is an other”) is NEMO’s theme this year: a broad reflection on the power of digital technologies to shape web users into avatars, creating autonomous, alternative ”digital personalities” and, as Lana Del Ray sings, “blurring the real and the fake”. NEMO is the Paris regional digital creation show, which opened 1 October at the Centquatre Paris arts center.

What struck me most strongly in this first part of this season-long and region-wide program of exhibitions, performance and activities, is an emphasis on the under-discussed, under-regulated manipulative propensities of the technology and systems that underpin the web, its doings and its dones.  But after all, unless you count non-fungible tokens – deliberated rarity – as art, there really is no such thing as ”digital art”. So, if it’s not for art’s sake what’s all this digital fascination, beauty and amusement in favor of?

It’s the acknowledgement of the question that makes NEMO worth seeing.

The curators know that digital technologies are mediums, the 21st Century equivalents of paint, paintbrushes, chisels and stone, not artistic content. As to the messages of these mediums, it’s most often very sophisticated, rather unscrupulous and, often, sinister sales and marketing bushwa sold in depouillé-design, small, shiny machines, metal cigarette packs.

When there is some genuine artistic content of digital-contained technology, it is some rigid arrangement of a or some algorithm(s) of visuals and/or sounds and plane geometries around infinite lines, trompe l’oeil boxes and cylinders) of previously recorded creation or the mediated projection of organics (humans doing monkeyshines). This is then spit into the eye in the form of fun-house style figures or multiple simulacra. The simulacra is inevitably worked up to enhance its attractive or manipulative effect on the human psyche. Usually both.

 

Marco Brambilla's “Heaven’s Gate”, a cascade of Hollywood. Photo © Marco Brambilla

Marco Brambilla’s huge, gorgeous Heaven’s Gate, for instance, is framed “to make reference to the Great Works of the Renaissance” and creates a ”life fresco” by repetitively serializing a cascade of previously-iconized Hollywood images (King Kong, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, etc., etc.). It’s art, surely, and I admit I stood there in front of it like a cat in the posture of ineffable longing, but I can’t say its digital art. It’s to note to that I walk away from Brambilla’s piece with a refreshed consciousness of brands and services and objects still under copyright.

On the other hand, it is less clear to me that Collectif Universal Everything’s Future You black box piece, which transforms then articulates then projects detected movement into line-and-ovoid figures, is art, digital or otherwise. Sure it’s an interesting artisanal object that can do interesting things, but, really, its content isn’t in the medium but in the talk-talk and palaver around its possibilities.

And, in terms of medium, message and content, the Brambilla and Universal Everything pieces are pretty much par for the course for “digital art”, the content or message is not wholly in the medium – those Hollywood images come from Hollywood, after all –  it’s mostly along-side it: And mostly the discourse can be summed up as an Ivana-Trump-equivalent simulacrum personalized to sell you on it.

As a physical experience, art done with digital technology gives the spectator a feeling without providing a physical referent for it. Maxime Houot’s Ataraxie fascinating laser-spurting cylinder is a good example. The scenic frame is pure space-movie, it makes you dizzy with psycho-perceptive trickery; I find myself grabbing on to Karine, solid as a rock, as usual, standing next to me.

 

In Bill Vorn’s bright digital future, even clunkier robots will have an I.C.U. Photo © Bill Vorn

And, whether we’re talking about art or not, the angle of entry into the digital space is mostly visual, although sound can be also.

Art and every other intentional content in the digital space manipulates certain flicker and, sometimes, vibration according to the rules of our perceptive faculties to enable experience.

But this doesn’t mean the non-manifested flicker and vibration disappear. They don't.

As strobe-sensitive people, folks with epilepsy and virtually anybody who is psychically borderline will tell you, in the digital space that flicker and vibration affect the brain in the same way that second-hand cigarette smoke affects the lungs. That’s why a day on the computer so wears a body out!

Line’s a little fuzzy, voices a little woolly, but all in all, it's good. “TribuT” by Jean-Luc Cornec. Photo © Quentin Chevrier Biennale Némo 2023

Nobody actually knows the effects of flicker exposure are.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, in combination with a cultural predisposition to paranoia and sales and marketing oriented algorithms, flicker, in particular, makes digital space a priori poison space.

And let’s note that, despite the huge role of flicker (and electronic wave and vibration) in human perception, studies are rather few and limited in scope. And this although since Western Antiquity, at least, people know about light and stillness on wellbeing.

Anyhow, a stroll through NEMO’s CentQuatre offer is a mind-teasing pleasure.

Curators have mobilized nearly 50 highly-skilled, thoughtful individuals and collectives to design, build and perform a whole range of installations, scenarios and choreographies from across Europe and North America.

Featured creators and creative enterprises include:

Donatien Aubert,
Tatsuru Arai, Charles Ayats & Vincent Dupont, Marco Brambilla,
Hasley Burgund & Francesca Panetta, France Cadet,
Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis,
Evian Christ,
Chen Chu-Yin & Daphné Le Sergent Collectif Impatience,
Robbie Cooper,
Jean-Luc Cornec,
Dos à deux,
Encor Studio,
Mathieu Gafsou,
Cristina Galán,
Frederik Heyman,
Maxime Houot,
Montaine Jean,
Stéphane Kozik,
Joris Lacoste & Hyoid,
Fabien Léaustic,
Aloïs Leclet
Tryphème & Ulysse Lefort,
Julien Loutelier & Axel Rigaud, Ariane Loze,
Adrien M & Claire B,
Émilie Anna Maillet, Wayne McGregor,
Meuko! Meuko!,
NeoConsortium,
Obvious,
Clare Poolman,
Christian Rizzo,
Jeanne Rocher,
Ian Spriggs,
TS/CN (Valentin Fayaud & Nicolas Michel),
Universal Everything,
Emmanuel Van der Auwera,
La Vaste Entreprise,
Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmitt, Tatiana Vilela, Dos Santos,
Bill Vorn,
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Etta Marthe Wunsch,
Xenoangel and
Zone critique


Click here for the list of installations and other programming.

Something like opera on a rocket ship: creating for space that talks back [By Tracy Danison]

Luara Raio’s “Apocalypso”, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia. Photo © Rachel Pimentel

A couple of years back I wrote about the challenge of art performance – Deploying original intentions and creative potential – at Lafayette Anticipations, the well-known visual and performance art venue in Paris’ Marais district.

All Lafayette’s installations and performances happen within what is, essentially, an elaborate sculpture of space by architect Rem Koolhaas. Basically, Lafayette is a large three-layer light well with viewing platforms.

If you’ve lived in a flatiron or a round building or had to renovate “atypical space” to live in, experience or instinct gives you some measure of Lafayette’s ongoing technical and esthetic challenge, interesting in itself. More broadly, whether doing dance performance or living life, the space it takes place in is a primordial feature of it; we are in an existential exchange with our surroundings.

A space can be mute: choreography that works fine in somebody’s basement won’t necessarily work at Opéra Bastille. A space can talk back: current life choreographies are transforming the natural environment from an indifferent ally into an existential threat.

Mute or responsive, exchange with space is an existential imposition. But both authentic living and art require will and intention, so finding a way to dialogue, deliberately shaping and grafting intentions into given space, is essential to creative success. Because Lafayette’s “space sculpture” has so much relentless will and intention built into it – Rem Koolhaas is always talking back –  it forces a spectator – at least, it has always forced me – to think hard about how a creator/choreographer/performer achieves dialogue from exchange.

Ivan Cheng. In situ. Photo Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations © Timboli

So far, whether for installations or performance, Lafayette’s three-layer light well sculpture has been made to work pretty well. For instance, both as experience and brain-teaser, the articulation of light and dark for Agnes Gryczkowska’s Spring 2023 installation, Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual, did the trick very well. And the space positively threw itself into its role as a big city pocket park for performance creator Lina Lapelyte’s The Mutes.

Strong choreographers at Lafayette can and do create dialogue through force of artistic intention. I’m thinking of Noé Soulier’s Mouvement sur Mouvement. Strong performers can and do master the space with a performance that creates a parallel space, resonating like an opera in a rocket ship. I’m thinking of Dorothée Munyaneza’s A cappella. Both performances featured in Echelle Humaine 2022.

At moments, too, Lafayette’s space can make for wonderful, one-of-a-kind success. My heart still beats hard when I think of watching dance performer Yuika Hashimoto’s re-creation of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic Violin Phase, which was followed by the choreographer’s de-creation of same at the bottom of that light well. Unforgettable stuff and only possible inside Koolhaas’ sculpture.

Essentially, Echelle Humaine 2023, which opens this Friday, 15 September, is challenging all its dance performance and installation creators to work deliberately within its unique performance space. Using public workshops, creator meet & greets, installations and choreographies, it has explicitly built its program around how that is, or can be, done.

The program is heavy on visualness and concepts. Installations include Alix Boillot’s Scénographie potentielle, a blue potato that inhabits it’s given space at the top of the light well and Tai Shani’s Reading room, which accents (her) recurring motifs. Ivan Cheng’s Clarities, is a purpose-built active installation-performance using video to satirize the creative process,  Luara Raio’s Apocalypso, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia, and Paul Maheke’s  L'Origine de la mort, featuring Alyssa "Ledet" Dillard, are both dance-performance duets, the former themed around cultural colonization and the latter around on the thinness of the lines between perceptions.

So let’s see how the challenge is met.