The Best American Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you listening, Times Letters page?

Here’s another should-publish.

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

It’s a big deal.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a big deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kamuyu now lives and works in France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was afraid to ask my neighbor what they heard.

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

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

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

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

Then I sense Spring.

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

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

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

Not Spring, but a Spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program Signes de Printemps 2022, Regard du Cygne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lift a glass to the banality of evil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex. Gender.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye of the storm

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

                                                                            - Lesley Gore, 1964

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect worse.

Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination

Toward a more perfect education: Carole Bordes, “Danser Mattox”, a dancing talk, Bien Fait! 2021, at Regard du Cygne

Before the lock downs of the past year and more, I liked participating in Micadanses-inspired performances. I say “participating” because the pieces usually presented work all along the line as what I call a happening-feeling-encountering that gets a body participating in the act of Imagination.

Imagination’s what the art of movement fosters chez the human and that’s why, as Mr. Darcy justly observes, every savage can dance. If we humans had a mite more Imagination to hand, we wouldn’t still be living in a civilization based on fire-powered wheeled carts.

Also, there may be other factors.

The Micadanses establishment is near Le Louis Philippe – named for the last “King of the French”, a weirdly nostalgic revolutionary notion –  a restaurant which now charms me with its un-plumbable air of the 60s, introduced to me by Karine, my significante, who went to school nearby. Why, one expects a couple of existentialists to roll up front of the place in a tin-pot 2-chevaux.

Karine says Le Louis Philippe has been its current, somehow cramped, self since she was just another snotty 16-year old. She means that in 50 years there has been no essential alteration to the place or the ambiance breathed through its marble-iron-glass sun-porch style w/ narrow garden half-heartedly plumped up by ornamental bushes deftly strangled up in chicken wire and basted in the ceaseless traffic noise from the quay. That’s why she brought me there in the first place, Karine says: she can be 16, 66, snotty and together with me, with room for her memories, too.

Anyhow, since the pandemic, I’ve come to have a warm, even homey, feeling about the Micadanses studios which, from the exterior, are just another boxy, austere faux-what style public building. Also it’s just down the street from the Shoah memorial, overcrowded with sadnesses big and little.

I broke out in accrued homey feeling last February, when Valentine Nagata-Ramos invited me there for a “WIP” performance of her Be.Girls piece.The invite brought about a change of mental paradigm which the new feeling about Micadanses may have used to slide into my psycho-affective construct.

In the Februarys of the childhood experiences which make my paradigm, the folks used to yank us kids out of school for a spell of rough and chilly camping on Cape Hatteras. Big and small, we’d just disappear from school. Puff!, as gone as if beamed up by aliens, then reappear some weeks later, Poof!, beamed down in mid-stride, as it were.

My folks knew the true secret to doing as you please, thank you. Do it and shut up. As “Ma” – my mother figure – made us understand, this private school vacation caper was so she and “Dad” – my father symbol – could assure themselves that the world hadn’t really frozen into a hard, grey blob. On Hatteras, there were at least roiling clouds and boiling sea, like on Jupiter, which is their home planet.

By contrast to my previous paradigm experience, then, the near-evening of Nagata-Ramos’ performance was not just cold and intolerably grey, it was flattened and empty, as if life had left off business for lack of interest. Circulez! Nothing to see here!

But Karine and I felt no urge to move on and we were feeling so grateful for the invitation, so happy to get out of the apartment, and quite sure we could escape from the flattenedness of that moment in that place …

And so we did escape.  

 

Christian & François Ben Aïm, “Facéties” program Bien Fait! 2021, at Théatre de Chatillon

Inside the faux-what architecture of Micadanses, near the Shoah memorial, near a place where we were 16 and 66, we were able to be with for the first time in months. Believe me, I’ve rarely felt human touch so truly as when uncomfortably cuddled up there among a heteroclite bunch of adults and children in the warm and, apparently, subterranean and clearly ambiguous “May B” auditorium.

Then, as we lay there in the dark, Nagata-Ramos’ new break-dance troupe surprised our hearts, opened us up on the subtle and elegant originality that structures the young choreographer’s very contemporary au féminin break dance.

Call me Dorothy, though.

When all is said and done, the elements of my stronger affection for Micadances, like the ruby slippers, were there all along. It’s not place or paradigm shift, nor gratitude to and fondness for past and particular performance that has led me – us or anyone else – to new or deeper sentiments for Micadanses or anything else.

As pretty much stated at the beginning of this essay, what does the trick is Micadanses’ consistency in hosting and presenting really very diverse ranges of work that, like Be.Girls, generate surprise in the heart – the sudden sensibility to a subtle and elegant originality – and through that, a way to Imagination.

Micadanses’ annual Bien Fait! (“Well done!”)  program of new creation is a manifest example of this… What? … This capacity for ex pluribus surprisus unum.

 

Sylvère Lamotte, "Tout ce fracas". To see. Bien Fait! 2021, May B auditorium, Micadanses

The program is made up of the work that creators have at hand at the end of a residence, whether finished or not.

According to Micadanses director Christophe Martin, invitations to present for the program are based on the “feeling” the work generates. I am guessing that “feeling” means that a performance manages to produce the surprise that associates to the subtle and elegant originality I was brought to see in Nagata-Ramos’ Be.Girls on that February evening.

And whether Martin means this or something else, I rush to say, we do need a critical language that explains spectator experience as well as creator intention. I’m not alone to think so, either.

However it may be, mainly in its May B auditorium (but sometimes hosted in other venues in and around town) – for instance, Théâtre de Châtillon in the petite couronne suburb of Châtillon or at Regard du Cygne in the Belleville neighborhood – Bien Fait! offers two weeks or so of diverse dance-performance and performance-dance from mid- to the end of September. And, as a general thing, the diversity of the offer has the knack letting a spectator get to where Imagination is.

This year’s Bien Fait ! opened in the Micadanses courtyard with François Lamargot’s exceptionally finished hip-hop company moving forward on his, Lamargot’s, unfinished hip hop-inspired contemporary piece, Pulse.

The spirit of Pulse made me think also of the sense behind Carly Simon’s tune Attitude Dancing: you make ‘em, you use ‘em, they belong to you. Pulse trades “attitude” for “emotion” and says “you are ‘em.”

Lamargot focuses choreographically on emotion until the spectator is surprised to understand that emotion is body and body is motion – which might, later, at Le Louis Philippe, lead one to imagine that the emotion-body relationship might just be a body-motion or motion-body or ... Garçon!

Lamargot’s quantum hip-hop, if that’s what it is, is followed seamlessly by Erika Zueneli’s contemporary-style performance Para bellum (“Prepare for war”) – I must say, a fantastic erotic creation!

Zueneli’s choreography manages to suggest to me not just the generally-supposed “link” between violence and the erotic but also surprises me into remembering that these separate but joined identities are for me impossible to parse, maybe never have been parsed, maybe have just been dictated by Saint Augustine fifteen-hundred years ago. So, if “violence” and “erotic” are just different words for the same thing, does that say that weird nostalgia, à la weirdly nostalgic “King of the French”, might be in among our most revolutionary demands? … Anyhow, something wonderfully confusing is surely in it.

This is how the Bien Fait! program goes: surprise after surprise pushing apart the joining seams on some elegant turn-turn-about of reality from creators as contextually and creatively different among themselves as Zueneli and Lamargot.

Among the pieces I was able to see this year: Mathilde Rance doing her Ubuntu around the Luba word for identity (something like “I am belonging am”) which is also the name of the Linux operating system, manifest and accessorized with pots and pans and a strikingly photogenic costume;  Laura Simi & Maurizio Ravalico doing The Loud Atlas, a danced songbook slap-sticking on the mysterious-inclined “Cloud Atlas Symphony”;  Sylvère Lamotte, Tout ce fracas, performed results of a study on “corporal re-appropriation in hospital environments” – a little play about helping each other that brought tears to my eyes that is to see if you’re wondering about human difference; Julie Salgues & Myriam Gourfink, Là (“There-Here”) doing not-quite-a-Heidegger jig around the dancer’s profession …  My personal favorite, though, is Lotus Eddé Khouri. Her newest creation, Believe, features a man-woman couple (Christophe Macé is the man, Eddé Khouri the woman) where muscle twitches only as called, as couple, bathed by lapping tides of Purcell’s The Cold Song, becomes duet. Doesn’t sound likely but Eddé Khouri makes it work well, exposing an ongoing and raging boil of experience from almost imperceptible movement.

So, surprise yourself with a little Imagination when you finally come back to Paris. If you came in early Fall, look for Bien Fait! If not, make sure to mark these creators down in your bucket list for when you need a little elegant originality ...

 

Rachid Ouramdane’s national dance theater: making space for imagination [by Paul Tracy Danison]

A couple of Johanna Faye’s Black Sheep dancing at, in, a point of transition  – Palais de Chaillot, 18 September 2021

I wonder if our civilization’s habit of building everything as an impossible play on a log cabin will be flushed out by the boiling floods and freezes of climate change? Will we come up with something that responds to our current needs and environment instead of harking back to forgotten fears of a big, chilly oak forest inhabited by grumpy gods?

I began wondering about this when I was at a program called Chaillot Experience, one of the events that Rachid Ouramdane, newly director of the newly-officialized Théâtre National de la Danse at the old Palais de Chaillot, is using to set a tone for a dance performance that, as he told Arte TV earlier this year, picks and chooses energies and movement in the world around.

Chaillot Experience used access and waiting space as performance space; there was no attempt to transform the palace’s restored art deco corridors, foyers and entries into anything else, just to show that dance can happen in them, too. Come to think of it, maybe those ordinary movements - entry, exit, waiting, watching - are dance essences, too …

Rachid Ouramdane, director of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, points to the dance in places, people and things where where before there was only movement

My part of the Experience was catching tightrope walker Nathan Paulin in the corner of my eye from the plate glass windows of the palace’s grand foyer while glancing around to see where the acrobatic troupe Cie XY was and what it was doing as it messily tumbled through the stairs and hallways. Johanna Faye’s Cie Black Sheep dancers covered the palace’s transitional spaces – breaks, branchings, landings, thresholds – with a Spectacle déambulatoire which winkled out this’ll-do-nicely niches for a variety of short, thrilling performances. Over the public address system, Paulin, barely a speck against the ironwork of the famous tower, continuously commented his 700-meter progress from the Eiffel tower to the palace’s esplanade, even as the rope swayed and gave way in the gusting wind.

Faye’s this’ll-do-nicely niche-ing reminded me of the emerging erotic energy around my high-school friend Evie’s at-homes before parents and school authorities noticed and stamped it out. Faye’s Black Sheep can dance. Cie XY seems to have eliminated gendering in their show, putting women on the bottom as well as on top of those dare-devil climbs and muscle clusters acrobats do. I thought it a sign or portent, if Janus-faced. Strong, delighted ladies, look sharp! If the Texas Taliban doesn’t forbid sinful clothes and declare y’all pregnant-in-principle, anyhow, I predict, gasp, adequate, if not yet free, public toilets in the very near future.

What got the log-cabin architecture riff into my brain the first place was a chance remark by an architect. She works on the team tasked with reconverting the Palais de la Porte Dorée from a place to admire, as the legends on the restored frescoes in the main hall put it, “France’s contributions to its colonial subjects” to a Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration. More an about-face than a reconversion, surely. But the architect – unafraid of a drink and a guffaw - remains sanguine.

She says that in building design – at least where the conceptual building blocks are lofty oak logs laid upon other oak logs – everything is potluck anyhow. Our log cabins almost never work as intended because, as a general proposition, our architecture is just about as un-adapted to environment it exists in as a green-grass lawn in the desert around Phoenix, Arizona, and generally resistant to anything Imagination might suggest. No need to sweat. Nobody’s to blame. Drink up.

All this baggage suggested to me that Chaillot’s Ouramdane is quite right: as it responds to our collective need for Imagination, dance bursts out of traditional forms and fills all the spaces available. Chaillot’s auditoriums (and those almost anyplace else) can’t accommodate an ordinary tightrope walker, let alone the sense at the heart of a Cie XY performance.

When you come to think of it, even Johanna Faye’s this’ll-do-nicely niche-ing where-you-can staging stretches the dramatic possibilities of log-cabin architecture to the limit. And what about the dancers and choreographers growing out of an ever- broadening vision of dance-performance?

It seems to me that at some point very soon, they’ll need space that is made for life – either dance will own all space as it does all movement or it will force us to introduce more diversity in how we can consider space.  

Whatever. Put Ouramdane’s dance program on your getting-back-to-Paris list. You’re likely to be intrigued by the life and imagination in anything you sign up to see.

Get your imaginations out: the case for a performance cure in Paris [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

"Les Merveilles", Clédat&Petitpierre. Photo© Y.Clédat

Belmondo is dead!

I’ve put up mosquito netting around the bed to protect Karine and, though mosquitoes have heretofore been thought to turn their proboscises from a knave’s corruption, to protect myself. At 06.30 hours in the second week of September, at 48.8566° N, the sky already lours hot and grey. At 08.00 hours, as I set out Karine’s tisane, the celestial scowl disperses before a pitiless sun. Heretofore, the sun trope has been stock for bright Timbuktu, not gray Paris.

As the day smolders towards evening, showers of hot, fat raindrops eruct; the drops are heavy enough to slap, all too apt to turn to hail.

About 40 years ago now, an article in the NYRB observed that the only known example of a planet-scale runaway greenhouse effect is Venus. It is 800°Celsius inside the planet’s perpetual methane-cum-co2 self-generating storm system. “Self-generating storm system” suggests to me that the milder effects coming up here on Earth are more likely to have driven our species to extinction well before things get as warmed up and wild as on our sister planet.

If the pandemic has proved anything at all, it’s that pure motives and reasonable plans notwithstanding, changing circumstances and a full third of people will oppose you and your damnable, liberty-killing plans.

"Panique", Clédat&Petitpierre. Pan cannot play his pipes yet. He can get on his legs and hump. Some say Pan is the son of Hermès. Photo©Y.Clédat

No matter that denying climate change has clearly failed to prevent obvious and dangerous climate change. The third is now spreading the depressing lie that it’s too late to act against the inevitable catastrophe: Be free! Consume, for tomorrow you die! When the depression tactic fails, the third will turn to applauding sabotage. Out of a spite that the third will dress up as an understandable “human need for revenge”.

As Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and He is Us”.

Given the complexity of the phenomenon and the human challenge, the junk exercise of “thinking outside the box” won’t do.  Positivism backed by little hops in good, solid science by good people just will not compass hot spells that cripple the young and kill the old or cold snaps that can freeze-dry woolly mammoths. Nor can solid science by good people inspire the Trotsky-like determination to execute and defend a social action plan that might let the species survive in the face of immanent catastrophe.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation story, the shower-obsessed space buccaneer hero Trevor is given a choice between melding with Earth and or remaining a “free” individual, “remaining human”. Trevor chooses to remain a space buccaneer hero, rejecting sexual freedom and powerful women, and flying off to conquer the universe and become as gods, presumably. 

"Les Mariés", Clédat&Petitpierre. Parc de Bercy. Photo©Y.Clédat

Asimov was presenting the choice and the outcome as most of the species still frames it (for more on this type of stuff, see my essay on ordinary-folks’ philosopher Michel Onfray’s otherwise inexplicable hatred of Greta Thunberg).

Of course, the real choice the species is confronted with is not “remaining ‘human’”. And it doesn’t imply becoming as gods and flying off to terraform Mars or capture comets. It’s about saving our species from its self-definition of itself thus far. The choice to be made is more like taking an engineering post or not at General Electric’s silicon plant in Waterford, New York, to feed and house and educate a large, varied and troublesome family than being or not a space buccaneer out to conquer the universe. Do we take up, or not, the responsibility for the complex system we call “Earth”?  The bottom line is: Is the species a variable, like Trevor, along for the ride, or do it strive to become a constant, co-responsible with system Earth? I’ve voted for co-responsibility.

And now the only way forward is Imagination.

Imagination is the seed of the leaps in outlook and science that our species needs to decide what to do. Imagination is the wit to, or the unbearable lightness of heart to, rip up the box just outside of which we’ve been orbiting too long, click together those ruby slippers and choose.

From scratch.

Not by chance, the function of dance is to enable Imagination.

"Les Baigneurs”, Clédat&Petitpierre. Taking some sun in the Jardin de Reuilly, Paris.

Hegel (or is it Kant?) was right: our species does have a mechanics of the whole that spontaneously responds to our collective becoming. Since the art of dance is the seed of Imagination, dance – and, so, as I’ve argued, dance-performance–  has been growing ever more present in our lives. It is no accident, either, that the most popular and practiced form of dance – hip-hop – is a values set and global movement that touches on every aspect of a free and responsible life among equals.

This idea came to me this past weekend.

I had decided to watch the six well-crafted performances by the veteran troupe Clédat & Petitpierre. The troupe opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season, which, like many other venues, is full of lots of post-pandemic treats.

Fun, clever and beautifully made, Clédat & Petitpierre performance systematically achieves art as well as entertainment. In conception, the river is always flowing, Schrödinger’s Cat is shamming and not. Each performance is on the real event horizon. Sensibilities are engaged. Feeling is studied and distinct. Territory engaged transforms spectator into participant.

As I watched and ruminated on this, I realized that as each of the troupe’s performances was able to achieve the quality of art, it enabled access to Imagination in its participants.

As the mechanics of the whole and becoming would have it, quality performance such as Clédat & Petitpierre’s, along with increasingly strong performance programming  have made Paris, and France, a showcase for performance and dance performance.

Allons'y! By tingling in the monkeys' thumbs, Imagination this way comes”. "La Parade Moderne", Clédat&Petitpierre, opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season. Photo©Y.Clédat

Performance and dance performance from small, developer-feeder venues such as Atelier de Paris, Regard du Cygne or Le Générateur, local theaters in and outside central Paris and in the regions and even the national dance theater are making city and country a must-do destination for the Imagination cure the species will be needing through the years to come.

Move that cat, ‘Cleitus! Thoughts on movement and its art [by Paul Tracy Danison]

Movement: Seven images same object, "Abri-Trou" E. Saint-James©Bernard Bousquet/Le Générateur 2021

When I see my baby/What do I see?/Poetry/Poetry in motion…/Her lovely locomotion/Keeps my eyes wide open …See her gentle sway ?/ A wave out on the ocean/Could never move that way!/ Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa/Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa Whoa!/Poetry in motion!

                                                                                           -  Poetry in motion, Johnny Tillotson, 1960

I was to see Elisabeth Saint-Jalmes’ Abri-Trou, “Sheltering-hole”, an installation at Le Générateur the other day. I dragged myself off the Blood-Red Récamier and went all the way across town, on a Sunday, at nap time… On Karine’s bike! And all that, while feeling a certain reluctance to fling myself into crowds of strangers in these days of what has shaped up as The Phony Lockdown…

I made the effort because, at Le Générateur, quite apart from the liberating pleasure in “being there with”, and whatever the shape a performance piece there takes, there’s something in it. If a it can sometimes fails as art, it hardly ever fails as entertainment.

In short, Le Générateur performance pickers have a knack for spotting well-made work.

The knack of picking performance well is rooted, I think, in an implicit grasp of an “art of movement”, of what makes artin a work of movement.

The notion of an “art of movement”, which I’ve previously associated with live performance (On the value of being there with) seems most often used to name “identifiable” dance pieces and performance intended as dance, but seems to spontaneously classify almost any performance that nobody is comfortable formally classifying.

 

Movement: Seven images same object, "Abri-Trou" E. Saint-James©Bernard Bousquet/Le Générateur 2021

As I see it, this is because “movement” is a short, plausible answer to the question, “What’s all that about?”: “It’s about the world, it’s about movement – all works of movement move”. And intellectually, that response is as satisfyingly insufficient today as “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” was in its time. Also, “movement” suggests that “startlement” stands in as a non-narrative equivalent to “dramatic tension”. We can then say that movement and drama “a (formal ordered sequence) of wake up calls” that mark out a shape to perception.

In respect to a work of movement, whatever a critic, creator or performer may say about other aspects of their experience or intention – and usually it’s something political, meta-political or moral – movement succinctly covers all or virtually all of the free-for-all of intention and technique that make of a performance a work of movement rather than, say, a work of narrative.

At ground level, the notion of a work of “movement” binds together history, performance genres and concepts. In a way that “a work of dance” could not, “movement” unites the sacred of dance in antiquity to the art in Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Mantua and the Great King’s Ballet de la nuit with Isadora Duncan’s heart, with Radhouane El Meddeb’s Swan Lake in diverse dishabille (Ballet du Rhin, 2018). It links the immediacies and esthetic aspirations of Happening with Niki de Saint Phalle’s assemblages with Andy Warhol’s Couch with any performance work at Le Générateur or her sister venues and through the wide vision of the late Jacques Charaud’s Le Ballet pour demain with all the international performance pieces met with in any given year’s Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine Saint Denis (Demain’s legacy festival). And so forth.

Movement not only binds together the art of works of past and present, it enables a common starting point for understanding today’s apparent riot of actual works on sets (WOSs, performing versions of WIPs).

 

Movement: Seven images same object, "Abri-Trou" E. Saint-James©Bernard Bousquet/Le Générateur 2021

“Movement” describes a shared sense of the world and esthetic sensibility between theater pieces by creators such as sculptor playwright Nathalie Béasse in work such as Aux Eclats (Théatre de la Bastille), which seems more in debt to cognitive theory than to anything else, and “straightforward” materialized-arts installations such as Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis, transformed from “art exposition” to “performance installation” by Lafayette Anticipations’ architecture-as-art architecture. Movement as shared sense and sensibility joins the broad, broad range of these former works with past and present dance and with it, performance and with them with the upcoming Christo-style “wrapping”  of the Arc de Triomphe with all, all contemporary dance happening, up to and including everything between quality contemporary plays on urban dance such Valentine Nagata-Ramos’ unbeatable ungendered break-dance Be.Girl (Théâtre des Champs Elysées) and Ruth Childs’ 100% class contemporary fantasia (Atelier de Paris) with “folk”, “traditional”, “ethnic”, “rock”, “sacred” and “religious” dancings everywhere and, even, with the jiggling, jumping, pirouetting chorus lines and dancing- belles and beaux livening up the electronic media offer… and, maybe especially, movement links all this to the drive in that nervous-looking guy from Africa in ragged gym pants and funky hat doing genius contemporary-dance-street-break around Christmas day on the empty Champs Elysées for spare change before scampering off as the police hove up…

Paris: Waiting on (May &) June Events [by our Paris correspondent]

“People United”, Joanne Leighton. Photo: Patrick Berger 2021

Children, behave!/That’s what they say when we’re together!/ And watch how you play!/They don’t understand/ And so we’re runnin’ just as fast as we can/ holdin’ on to one another’s hand,/ tryin’ to get away into the night,/and then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the gound/and then you say, ‘I think we’re alone now!”/The beating of our hearts is the only sound…

Tommy James and the Shondells, 1967

Paris’ performance spaces are set to open on 19 May. After three lovely days of six performances at the Atelier de Paris’s audience limited and socially-distanced “platforme professionnel”, I want that. I really want it. I long for it.

I am not the only one longing, either. Since late March, like Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Maine Auntie tying to wish up the telephone to call a quack on the mainland, my pal Huang has been willing the Avignon festival into renewed existence. However, the general tone is on-verra-bien, of battle-weary poilus. Everybody’s sick of everything, whether of the know-nothing yahoos on the right, woe-is-my-purse business types or the jumpy government, afraid things will bugger all at the last minute.

Tempted by tastes of pleasure like Atelier de Paris’ lovely plateforme professionel and longing just to get on with it, I still just don’t know if an opening really should happen this coming Wednesday.

My doubt is part partial observation, part gloomy signs and portents, part finicky rationality, part home truth. Some years back, it seems I inherited that little bird who used to shamelessly tittle-tattle my lies and evasions to my mom. This damnable volatile witters on in a voice pitched between feu-mon doux frère gasping his last prophecy and Cardi-B cheerfully praising her own twat.

“Trace,” croons the bird, “Six weeks on and this so-called world’s-second-greatest-market and super-power-in-its-own-right has vaccinated you once… Not the best of vaccine choices, neither. … And, this R -.75 notwithstanding, the overall data’s no thrill – look at those clusters on the cloud graph … Trace,” sneers my little bird, “Tracy. Is it any wonder that Avignon – then, as now, a dense honeycomb of tiny, airless rooms sweltering inside a stone labyrinth of narrow, humid passages – is most famous for a truly legendary losing bout with the Black Death? … And. Tracy,” the bird pauses for effect, “Listen… When all is said and done, doesn’t contemporary France, private and public, plexiglass, steel and concrete France, conserve, preserve and just still stink with a cheek-by-buttocks social architecture and social organization worthy of medieval Avignon? ”….

I’ve got my doubts indeed. But, finally, the Atelier de Paris’ excellence has shown me a better way. In fact, I’ve already said yes to the opening of the Printemps Arab festival on the day. Damn the torpedoes! And all that.

What made the Atelier so persuasive?

Programmers usually try to capture what’s in the air, what’s good, what’s hip. But, at least this time, the Atelier tried to do only sensibilities. The program was a dance that moves movement, a dance that carries the force of feeling, a dance that just dances, a performance that performs irony, a dance that calls up worlds, a performance that shows philosophy: Liz Santoro’s Mutual Information; Joanne Leighton’s People United; Françoise Tartinville’s Collage, Jeanne Brouaye’s Ce qu’il reste à faire et la où nous en sommes (“What we still need to do and where we’re at”?), Aina Alegre’s R-A-U-X-A , Madeleine Fournier’s La Chaleur (“Rut”?). Exploding math, meta-politics, dancing to dance, irony as truth, world creation, parody is as philosophy. All that beats my cobweb hands down.   

These performances were not just sparklers, either. One of them, at least, Joanne Leighton’s People United, came off as a dance performance, a nearly a perfect ballet, a nearly a perfect happening. Remmember, Mary Poppins, my spiritual auntie, says “nearly” does for “perfect” as we know it in the Vale of tears, here below.

Like Valentine Nagata-Ramos’, BE.GIRLS – also premiered for professionals, at Micadances earlier in the year –  People United, in its near perfection, seemed to me to mark a last milestone on the road to the paradigm shift, O! Devoutly wished. Both groundbreaking. Both gorgeous. Both, absorbing.

So. Not only was not a single one of the Atelier’s chosen plateforme professionnel premiers in any sense a disappointment. Each performance absolutely sparkled with conceptual refinement carried by writerly discipline, materialized by sober scenarists and done by well-practiced performers. I emphasize well-practiced now, in the light of Covidzeitefahrungen, because the besetting sin of France’s (live) performing arts is sloppy execution, which I too often forget to notice. So maybe the Covid emergency has done some good all around.

Keep the Atelier de Paris in mind when you’re next in Paris – the time is not far off.

At least, let’s hope it isn’t. 

COVID woke: the thrill of the live performance moment located

Photo: Courtesy Atelier de Paris

What you gonna do when you get out of jail?
I'm gonna have some fun
And what do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun

The Genius of Love, Tom Tom Club

I got a thrill when the Atelier de Paris’ newsletter appeared in my inbox the other day.

“Thrill”?

Aren’t thrills reserved for moments of life, like the moment when I first touched the cool, dry hand of the – these days – pale, vaguely adipose, woman just behind me, limbs lopping deadlike off our blood-red Récamier?

The livelong day now, this woman hogs the whole of our empty ceiling with her disgruntled stare. The stare, I must say, in its hint of godlike irony, is a work of esthetic genius.

I get up, bend my face over hers so I can kiss her and she me.

We do. Tamed it may be, but a thrill is there, here and now. This is a moment: here and now. Of course, by the time I sit back down and she’s reverted to her esthetic state, we’ve both forgotten the thrill and the moment – it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense if we spent every blessed moment savoring the thrill of it.

God’s bones, we get little enough done as it is.

True science observes, anyhow, that moments are the twisted skeins of a life, the bosons of a thing of talking flesh. Smollett demonstrates that thrill is the invisible but sensible ether that jolts a life this way and also that and thus visibles the otherwise fleeting moment.

Cécile Mont-Reynaud, “La Fileuse”. Photo © Pauline Turmel

Four years ago now, the Circassian (artist-acrobat) Cécile Mont-Reynaud, whose high-wire performance as Fate thrice-personified in her performance La Fileuse (“Yarning”), proved all this beyond a doubt in front of the public library Romain Rolland in the eastern suburb of Romainville, now served by the number 11 line. Karine was there and, if you can get her attention, she’ll vouch for it from our blood-red Récamier, reading from the stippled whitewash of the naked ceiling.

“A medusa, a mop,” I wrote as Mont-Reynaud’s skeins visibled in the senible ether, “A fleeting moment,  lampshade merry-go-round, a cocoon, a caterpillar turned weeping willow, a shower of rain, a pinata, a bird’s gilded golden cage, a trunk, an obstacle course of visibled bosons, a raging sea, a maypole, a ladder of knots or a knot of ladders, a spherical stair of golden hair... an uneasy plinth-cum-diving board to address the gods and reason men, slip knots, electric wires, cords and dis-chords, strands of muscle. Swing through string: What a thrill.”

There you have it.

Memory only makes it seem thrills make moments or vice versa. But thrill is a moment here and there and everywhere. And memory? Another subject.

So, I felt a thrill the moment I saw the Atelier’s newsletter in my in-box.

Not because choreographers’ Liz Santoro and Joanne Leighton figured there, although they do. But because I suddenly realized that the Atelier’s message – “No live performance”– has, after more than a year of crise sanitaire – has suddenly become the general one.

The simple negative thrills because until now, under the guise of a performer’s traditional declaration of loyalty to performance - “The show must go on!”, there’s been a lot of confusion and delusion about just what “live” performance is or can be.

Suddenly, whether because audiences came to understand why they go to the trouble of going to live in-personperformance or because producers realize that the live-and-in-person they mean can’t actually translate to pixels, the confusion seems to be over.

It has become pretty clear to everyone that “live performance” means “in-person performance” - the thrill of live performance is the moment of being there with creation and creators.

We should all keep the thrill of being there with in mind in the coming weeks and months. We may find ourselves arguing hard to keep on being there with – when there are so many “cheaper” alternatives.

Liz Santoro. Photo courtesy of Atelier de Paris & Liz Santoro                  

With hopes fading for a relaxation of health emergency restrictions, “Mutual Information”, programmed for Atelier’s annual “June Events” program, is Santoro and Pierre Godard’s latest piece of live and in-person mathematics. “Mutual Information” will likely open later on the post-pandemic landscape of live performance, along with Joanne Leighton’s “People United”, the final piece in her trilogy on universal gesture. “People United,” which explores humanity’s shared moments, is built from a body of nearly a thousand photos of people acting together that have been taken over more than ten years across every continent.

Photographer Sarah Meunier lays bare quarantine in "le moment bizarre"

“Day 1” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu ©Sarah Meunier

Ami entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines/… C'est nous qui brisons les barreaux des prisons / …Motivés, motivés/ Il faut rester motivés!/ Motivés, motivés/ Il faut se motiver!

                                                        – “Motivé, Le Chant des partisans” - Zebda

Here is an odd fact such that one only learns when the extent of one’s activity is staring into space,  listening to shards of famous operas and wondering about the history of words floating listless in the Zeitgest. The English “quarantine” – “40 days isolated” is cognate with the French “quarantaine”,  which also means “forty-something”.

I mention this because, just to see how she’s been holding up in le moment bizarre – I mean, what with the shelter in place orders, the remote working, the masks, the absence of mountebanks, monoliths and UFOs, the eternal grinding gears of  – …. Of...what? Exactly? Love? Longing?  –  I mailed the photographer  Sarah Meunier the other day.

Sarah not too terribly long ago, graciously sent readers of the Best American Poetry a Joyeuses Fêtes! in portraits of the people of Bagnolet, the little Paris suburb where we both live. Motivée, in spite of all, maybe because of it all, too, Sarah keeps on scanning the horizon, not just the ceiling. 

“The Lightbulb” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

All indoor, online, hygienically confined, of course, Sarah’s horizon has lately had to be herself, which is as close to a virtuous philosophy as one can get in, in fact, some say it's as close to wisdom as one can get. She titles her series Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu.

As I say, Sarah Meunier looks in while looking out; I, on the other hand, look out while looking in. Clearly, her looking loop not only starts differently than mine but gets stretched and molded differently, too.

I’m waiting with dead hands for the theaters to reopen, for the mountebanks to peacock, waiting to rush into a crowd and see Gaëlle Bourges’ OVTR (ON VA TOUT RENDRE) and Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s MUTUAL INFORMATION. Both at the Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Both pieces remind me of the infinite variety of the Dance that powers the quantum wave we are. Bourge’ll do it through extravagance of movement, Santoro through precision of it.

“The package” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu ©Sarah Meunier

Sarah Meunier, in contrast, looking inward to look outward, will be spending her end-of-the-year breakout cultivating her post-Covid Expo-Choc of Comic-book style shots and reflecting on Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu, an experiment, she says, in “becoming (my)own object”, which at the same time looks at how much the objects of her life are part of her as a subject.

Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu twists 21st-century selfies into gartered-nude poses and postures, like the mouldering Playboy pin-ups my grandad kept into his fishing trailer at Burr Oak lake.

“The Laundry” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

While Sarah Meunier says she did her pin-ups for fun and to keep her hand in, she also says that a bout with her self-object allowed her to get more comfortable – in her 40s – with herself as a being in a sexual as well as a professional as well as ordinary posture, just like everybody else.

“Saturday clean up” Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu©Sarah Meunier

Sarah’s take on Playboy philosophy discovers the now-obscure eroticism in Any-woman’s dusting, tidying and service. Sarah’s Playboy eye sees herself through a old-fashioned-become-ironic style (and persistent paradigm) and, slipping man-pleasing unmentionables among her naked world of mop handles, canned soup and empty fridge lets herself find or reveal a sassy-assed provocation in her own daily bending, reaching and lifting. 

Sarah’s fans, with time to get ruffled up, have got ruffled up by her Quarantaine series – largely because, she says, preening around naked rather than painting portraits of everybody else, forced them to let her come out of the box of their expectations. She was also pleasantly surprised, she says, to have a mostly positive response from her woman fans and friends.  

But, Sarah says, while getting out of the outside-expectations box and getting peer support were both a great relief to her, she was puzzled that her quotidian-level collaborators seemed to have already accepted her as having a life and a sex and all that jazz. She wonders why she had doubted that so long.

So, Sarah Meunier says, it turns out that the on-going effort to be a whole person rather than a packaged series of socio-culture types and roles meets less resistance, whether outside or inside, than she had expected.

Movement, Life, Dance-nature and the value in Dance-practice [by Tracy Danison]

Ayelen Parolin’s “WEG” dance-performance choreographs observation, imitation, vibration, variation and novelty, letting onlookers revel in the complex subjectivity of human relationships. “Indispensable !”, Atelier de Paris, 11 September 2020.
Photo©Benoîte Fanton

For this year’s Nuit Blanche culture and arts festival, I chose a performance venue called Le Générateur. While I was hanging around waiting for another show to start, somebody suggested a visit to an installation-performance called déjà… j’ai habité tous ce mots. The performance was originally scheduled for the local park but the government closed the parks abruptly as a health-emergency measure. I had to go in a doorway and wait at the foot of a stairway for somebody to come get me. There was a low table with beribboned paper scrolls strewn over it; little blue link-light lit the stair risers. After a while, a young woman called, as I learned later, Anne-Sarah Faget, came down, said hi, grabbed a scroll, unrolled it, made a sign for me to follow. As she went up the stairs, she began to read – at first, I didn’t realize it was a poem, by a dead Congolese poet called Sony Labou Tansi, I learned afterwards, who had, as I followed, a resonance of sense-of-Baudelaire. Anticipating Anne-Sarah Faget’s pace was hard – it’s hard to follow anybody  – clumsy collision is the stuff of comedy. You have to concentrate, I had to concentrate – how far is right, how near is wrong? I didn’t want, nobody wants, to be left behind.

Then I heard the poem Faget was reading. Sony Labou Tansi says consciousness has destroyed the world and all that is left is that making-dream of ours, a dream like the mist between two mountains at a distance. ‘Though it comes from somebody already beyond the grave, the observation moves me.

Anne-Sarah Faget arrived just before me in a room where scrolls like the one she was reading the poem from hung from the ceiling, like rolls of sticky fly catcher or like room partitions. She handed our scroll to a handsome African-looking fellow – whom I later learned is called Cheriff Bakala – who bade another man rise and me sit. In a warm, smiling baritone, the handsome man read the rest of Sony Labou Tansi’s poem to its finish. After, I helped Bakala hang the scroll from the ceiling, a sticky flycatcher or a space partition, like the rest.

Until moving within what I call Faget and Bakala’s “dance- (performance)”, I had never known what “carried away by words” meant. I do now.

But there’s more sense to dance- (performance) than inhabiting the language one uses. There’s also the fact of movement in dance- (performance), the foundational fact that movement in space is what I feel to be “me” and the foundational fact that the “me” in space is what we mean when we say experience.

Faget and Bakala, and the artist-performers and programmers at Le Générateur and elsewhere, are not the first to recognize the fundamental importance of movement in space in the construction of human experience.

Heraclitus and Aristotle both thought that Life, capital “L”, is the movement in things, in atoms. Contemporary scientists think movement (“vibration”) is in both ordinary and quantum things. Dance – the art of movement – links us to the consciousness that we and ours, all six degrees of us, are movement.

"Dance-nature”, let’s say, marks our difference from stumps of wood or shards of volcanic glass. We experience our relationship with ordinary things as a pas de deux of movement and material, subject and “other”.

Ayelen Parolin’s “WEG”, Atelier de Paris. Photo:©Benoîte Fanton

As in other innate relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around. And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.

And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around.  relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.

After all, while Dance-nature enables us to sense that all the other elements that make up the world around are subjects, like us, Dance-practice enables us to open a dialogue with that subjectivity. Isn’t facing up to the environmental emergency – not just dealing with “rising sea-levels” or “hotter summers” or “deluge rains”– a matter of understanding that our complex interaction with our environment resembles more than anything else our interaction with our infinitely subjective fellow humans?

And, until now, hasn’t dealing with each other mostly meant an ultimately futile effort of trying to overmatch each other with a better tool: club to sword, sword met by shield, castle met by cannon, machine gun met by tank? And so far, the best reply overmatching has generated has been mutually armed destruction. But MAD won’t work with other types of consciousness than human: “Men come and go, but Earth abides”.

Maybe, if we Dance-practice more, in the same way that the chase game suggests new ways of hopping on each other, some new ways of negotiating with each other and the world around will suggest itself.

Theory of the “bise”: why social distancing alone won’t stop a Covid redux in France [by Tracy Danison]

Masked and distanced but pleased to be there. Audience at Ayelin Parolin’s "WEG" dance performance, 12 September 2020, during the Atelier de Paris Indispensable ! festival. Photo © Benoïte Fanton

As I write, it is still early and, as nearly every weekday morning, the little kids downstairs are off to pre-school. I hear them rustling around on the landings, tugging on their wraps. I hear hurried Dads chivvying them down the stairs, hear them calling up “Bisous, Maman”, hear Mamans calling down, “Bises, ma Chérie, Bises!” La Bise or le bisou, used interchangeably, means “a kiss”, connoting “a little (viz., widdle, liddle, wittle) kiss(ie)”. It’s sweet sound in the morning and cheering. We need a little cheer too.

The corona stuff is getting old.

Though ICUs still have capacity, the Paris region and France in general are experiencing significant rises in both Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations. While the median age of those sick unto death, dying or dead, is 60, infection is spreading mostly in institutional settings such as workplaces and health establishments among 20- and 30-somethings. Up to now children in school are a negligible factor.

Authorities made masks mandatory in work places in early September. Lately they have taken marginal actions such as shutting gyms, requiring bars and cafés to close early and encouraging distance appointments. While able to take quick quarantine action thanks to institutional organization and firm public support, delays in producing test results - largely thanks to an un-thought – through free test-on-demand option – has seen authorities struggling to set up a reliable tracking system. Also, political concerns about privacy, some fears, especially among the young, of the lifestyle consequences of testing positive and assumptions both about the efficacy of technology and about what the public will bear, mean that the smartphone app hasn’t produced any miracles and that obvious moves such as collecting customer names and numbers in cheek-by-jowl gathering places such as cafés, bars and restaurants has not been tried.

In spite of the shortcomings, the rise, as in Italy and Spain, is something of a puzzle.

As far as I can make out, despite caterwauling and recrimination, France’s goddamned gumint is as stolidly competent as New York’s or Korea’s or Germany’s. Indeed, weren’t he such a caricature of an empathy-challenged nerd, President Emmanuel Macron’s faith in the power of solutions through strategic fact-based analysis and well-organized public action would almost be enough to make him liked.

Alas, unable to understand sociocultural issues more complex than those represented in an Isaac Asimov novel systematically gives people grounds for distrust of his good sense and judgment. For instance, Macron recently remarked that critics of his planned 5G or 6G or 7G – whatever – wireless net rollout were a passel of Amish. It is simply beyond the poor fellow’s power of imagination that some be-hatted, bonnetted organic farmers might actually have a notion of a “good life” that doesn’t include a smartphone and invasive advertising. Nor does it occur to Macron and his buds from engineering school that it is important that France has a lot of Amish-types who don’t wear bonnets and big hats perhaps, but who do frame the rigors of lockdown, unpaid hard work and lifestyle inconveniences as acts of human solidarity and not just enlightened self-interest.

Macron’s lack of imagination depresses, but it isn’t unique to France. Imagination, here and throughout the world, seems to be cowering out ce moment bizarre in sub-basement level 13, to the left of the abandoned tool-room, in the corner, not too far from the big rusty crack where the Terminator burst in from the future in the early 80s, under the moldy poster of Munch’s “The Scream” and the tattered 1956 Playboy centerfold.

It’s even harder to blame the bloody-minded Gallic masses than the goddamned gumint for the Covid Redux. Of course, in the same way that Charles De Gaulle disclaimed responsibility for his political failings as the country’s tendency to make too many kinds of cheeses when one or two good one’s would do, citizens dismiss vexations they don’t want to be blamed for by denouncing the inconscience et indiscipline des Français. However, as my teenaged daughter used to delight in observing, blaming the concitoyen is just a harmless way of burning off the cynicism and doubt generated by all the investment in Amish-style notions of citizenship. Any old walk to any old cheese shop in any diversely ethnic neighborhood is on the whole an object lesson in a public-spirited health and hygiene conscience et sérieux that most respectable stereotypes could impute only to Germans.  

Different kinds of distance. Simon Senn finds a fit with Arielle F’s virtual body for the Covid-time Zoom-live performance “Be Arielle F, 2020” at Lafayette Anticipations, Echelle Humaine dance performance festival, 23 September 2020. Photo © Mathilda Olmi

Since I shuffled back to Paris round about the first of September, I’ve been in constant attendance at two public schools and a teeming university, made frequent visits to bustling open-air and inside markets and supermarkets and public agencies, and, of course, traveled in over-crowded trains, buses and subways. So far, putting aside the usual suspects, the yahoos guzzling beer, smoking and yakking in the little urine-soaked niche near the betting shop, I’ve been the only one I’ve observed who has sometimes not worn a mask, even in the street. Also, for the record, I’ve been to five different performance venues, each with its own architecture and spectator-reception challenges – Atelier de Paris, Théâtre de la Bastille, La Scala Paris, Palais de Chaillot and Lafayette Anticipations – and eye-balled protocols and executions. Especially impressed by the efforts of the Théâtre de la Bastille, which opened with a strong production of Nathalie Béasse’s excellent Aux Eclats, and which has been designed for everything but non-intimacy and distance of any sort, I’ve seen nothing anywhere if not thoughtful application of the guidelines carried out by thoughtful people anxious to ensure the health and safety of others and of themselves.

So, no, it’s not the bloody-minded masses or the socially Amish among us to blame, either.

And, if it’s not the citizens and not the government to blame for the Covid Redux, I’ll blame la bise, point the finger at le bisou.

Like any kiss, large or small, une bise is not, is never just a kiss.

Neither love not hate, nor ever quite neutral, la bise is process, not thing, gerundive, not noun, an approach to the business and culture of life. Call le bisou, an “elan de bise”, a “kiss-drive”, toward a certain type of social entanglement whose closeness may or may not become intimacy, élan de bise always tends to a closeness that is intrinsically un-Covid-time-adapted.

Elan de bise may be unique to this particular culture but it is not the only socio-cultural drive in existence. My own American Gothic-style upbringing includes a drive toward tragedy, an élan that pushes me toward tragic (self-exculpatory) distance. The motive power of both is as enduring as it is strong and subtle. Even after 30 years of deliberately living elsewhere and otherwise, I was brought not too terribly long ago to hovering dry-eyed over my dying mother and, as adieu, squeezing her cold, papery hand but once and at that lightly. Elan de bise has been around a lot longer than the corona virus and is a lot more motivating (and socially important) than government health and safety regulations.

La Bise has force enough to reign among adopted Amish such as my dear old friend Uwe and I, as well as among just plain family and friends.

Théâtre de la Bastille management and staff made difficult decisions to make enough distance to make way for real theater performance in this otherwise closely-knitting venue. Scene from the premiere of Nathalie Béasse’s “Aux éclats”, 14 September 2020. Photo © Jean Louis Fernandez

Uwe invited me to his post-lockdown picture show in mid-Summer – the first time I’d seen him since lockdown … Uwe! Tracy! Super! Bisou, bisou! Ach! Zut! O! Man! Sorry! Ahh, well! Then, here’s a rub: Can a bow, a shouted remark, an arm in salute, be enough emotional satisfaction for an adult whose little piggy-toes you once bisoued to an ecstasy of coo and gurgle? Who can be sure? Conflicted, Uwe’s Juliette, his Martin and his Agathe, his friends, children and my acquaintances spent the whole evening desperately grasping for anti-Covid hygiene, but grappling mostly with each other, stumbling into each other with every clumsy elbow bump, spattering each other with every sentence of ever-closer-to-the-ear commentary, spewing subtle poison with every airborne hand-to-off-the-nose-mask kiss.

Elan de bise rules communities and neighborhoods as much as families and friendships.

My ear had been missing the “Bisous, bisous, Maman” of little Jena from the second floor. She’s usually an enthusiastic one. I know the parents Marie and Charlie hardly at all and probably won’t ever. But we’re neighbors and, among other things, we’ve done co-op general assembly and ce moment bizarre together … I went down and knocked at their door. Marie opened. Before either one of us could utter a word, a bathed, pajama-clad Jena, shouting “Bisou, bisou”, sprang from behind Marie. I fell back a little and, to keep the little brute at arm’s length, rather tenderly laid my hand on her head. I do like little kids; their naiîve enjoyment of life is infectious. I was glad to see Jena.  

By now Jena’s used to what she probably thinks of as social baulking, so, like an especially big and inquisitive kitty-cat, she dropped the bisou-bisou and hung in the social distance between us as we chatted. It was only when I was leaving that I realized I had spent the whole time stroking Jena’s hair!  I “forgot” to wash my hands until well afterwards. What sort of rational monster thinks of washing his hands after stroking the freshly-washed hair of a out-going, vivacious and sweet pajama-clad toddler?

Through in dignant form, the toddler’s “Bisou-bisou” also rules relations with big society, the miscellaneous characters that people one’s life – from supermarket cashiers to gardeners to work acquaintance and bureaucrats to landlords to local politicians to members of the gym – as well as with folks one reads about, hears or sees in life’s background, but only really meets by coincidental dribs and drabs.

I finally decided to go back to the gym last Saturday. When I got there, pretty early in the morning, Michel, the owner, was just locking the doors. Seeing me, being rather of the inconscience et indiscipline des Français school of social philosophy, Michel launched into his usual denunciation of France, the French, incompetent government and tax-gobbling bureaucracy. Just as he believes instinctively that his imitation of my accent is a comic masterpiece we both must surely enjoy, he believes that I, as an American-born, will sympathize with his criticisms of France and “the French”.

Both masked up – noses at a notional but friendly, normal, social distance of an inch and a half – Michel denounces and I lament the Closing of the Gyms, the latest plague to descend Ófrom on high. I pull away from Michel as I say I understand all the same what the government had to contend with and that, look-you, we are damned lucky to have rational government, anyhow.  I lean forward, he leans forward, I touch him on the shoulder and wish him courage! as he hops into his fancy car. Michel, not to speak of the ungrateful gimme-mine trainers he has not thrown to the wolves, must be under awful financial pressure. That’s what I had told him. Also, that I’ll be back.

In fact, we’ll all be back. Back because, maybe it’s true, the elan de bise is to blame prolonging the national agony. But, then, it’s surely one of the big reasons to come back, too. 

 

On the value of being there with: Dance, the “art” of movement [by Tracy Danison]

Noe Soulier’s “Passages” in movement at the Gothic forest of the Conciergerie. Photo Patrick Berger ©Atelier de Paris

I met Huang by chance… In the line, quite by chance, Huang was… By chance, I met Huang in the line… to see Noé Soulier’s Passages at the Conciergerie on the île de la Cité… Passages was part of the Atelier de Paris’ brave post-lockdown Indispensable ! performances program concentrate.

Huang had a good place in line, so, full of bluff and bonhomie (thus fobbing off challenges to my cutting the line), I slithered in next to him. While we, as always, talked excitedly about the performance, underneath I was actually excited by the prospect of going inside the Conciergerie.

Until the Passages performance, I had only been able to cast my eyes through high grimy windows onto the Conciergerie’s vast sunken hall. I thought that it surely is true Gothic. Spiritual, you know. Though I told Huang it was about primeval forests and barbarian cultural memory, not something so damned woolly. I wouldn’t want him getting the wrong idea about me.

Even through dirty windows, I have to say, the profane eye travels up the plain squat stone pillars, rides the surge of arcing groins into the shadow of vaults high above. The eye rests there, surprised, as if by sudden light, startled into mind. Indeed, before it became Marie Antoinette’s death cell and a tourist attraction, the Conciergerie had once been the throne room of Clovis I, King of All Franks, a German tribe that pretty much ran this corner of northern Europe at the time.

Spirituality and history. Rejecting the Arian god-man theory of Jesus’ divinity, Clovis I subscribed the three-spirits-same-flesh or Trinitarian theory, thus ensuring a 1000-year primacy for the misguided theories of language of Augustine of Hippo, doctor of Christianity. I blame Augustine and subsequent Christian poohbahs for sanctioning the cruel habit of making reality from words : De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da. Augustine, not that sweet old Romantic Goethe, is responsible for “Those-are-not-bombs,-honey” Goebbels.

I expected Noé Soulier’s Passages would in some way flesh out the history and architecture of the Conciergerie, illuminate my mind’s eye with some unbid aspect of the place. Instead of Clovis or Augustine or the Police, Yasmine Hugonnet came to mind.

As good in her way as Sting, Hugonnet is a dancer and choreographer whose work I’ll have the pleasure to see at Atelier de Paris in October, and have seen at Regard du Cygne and Lafayette Anticipations – very different contexts.

Hugonnet calls her performance troupe Arts Mouvementés, thinking of how, as her web site has it, “form, image and sensation intertwine, how the imagination, becomes …” and how “the process of incarnation and appropriation” works through and how to get these things into or out of choreography.

Beyond negotiating the twists and turns of choreographic culture and heritage to intertwine, incarnate and appropriate into a given performance, it seems to me that Hugonnet’s insight is that “dance” is definitively not, of course, about contextual bumping, grinding and flinging out the arms, however delicately, classically or expressively, but about movement. And in this, she – along with a lot of her sisters and brothers in dance – is going a bit farther than Isadora Duncan’s Dance-as-(sacred, human)-art, understanding it more as an access of universal primal force, quite beyond the first-take “shaking-up” sense of mouvementé to something more like prime mover, moving, moved, becoming, happening.

Those kids down on the corner, spinning on their hips, flipping over, fast as lightning, talking loud and completely unconscious that the nervous old white lady is calling the police on? They aren’t just having fun, they are doing truth in a quantum universe, a universe that exists because it moves. I hope the police don’t gas and whack ‘em too hard before the world changes cameras.

So, I think, as I wait on a bench in a medieval forest of stone pillars sculpted of yellow half-light, however Huang might experience the esthetics of Noé Soulier’s choreography or however I might myself experience watching this, being here with Huang and other dance-friends and strangers, all will, must, involve movement.

What’s important to performance is not how or to what end but the fact of movement. Soulier’s very fine troupe chase around plain stone pillars, Clovis’ ghost clanks in the torch-yellowed light shadows, my eye roves for mystery.

As I come out of the Conciergerie into the suffocating evening heat of what used to be early Fall and offer to walk a little way with Huang, I understand that “movement” is the core value of “Dance”. So the “art of Dance” is also “art of movement”. The “art” being what I hope Hugonnet (and Isadora Duncan) will forgive me for rhetorically shaping as the act and representation of the “intertwining of form, image, sensation, imagination, incarnation and appropriation into and out of choreography”.

Performing by ear, Paris venues open doors, point the sky [by Tracy Danison]

“Cold Blood”, state-of-the-art live performance by Michèle Anne De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and Kiss & Cry collective, La Scala Paris, 2019. Photo©Julien Lambert

Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear/ Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here/ Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right - Here Comes the Sun – George Harrison, 1969

France just reached nine thousand daily infections again, I hear. There are uncertainties but, under rational government, a bit of risk, even delicately calculated risk, is a reasonable bet – especially in something as important as the performing arts.

Gwénaël Morin’s Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies opens Atelier de Paris’s ten-day wonder Indispensable! program, heavy on new creation, with performances in open and closed space until mid-September. Indispensable! is my foot in the post-pandemic waters but also opens the 49^th annual Festival d’Automne, the Paris theater, film, music, dance and visual and tactile arts program – which runs into February 2021.

Over the coming week I’ll be seeing, among others, artists who should have been featured in the Spring, at the Atelier’s June Events or the Printemps Arabe programs, or that, like Gwénaël Morin’s piece are also part of the Festival d’Automne. Performers on the Atelier’s Indispensable! program include  Noé Soulier (at the Conciergerie); Thomas Hauert, Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, and Carolyn Carlson, who proves that dance makes getting old unnecessary at any age. In late September, if all goes well, I’ll be seeing new circus performance by Bartabas, who demonstrates better than anyone the links of potential between species, dance by choreographers such as Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz. Charmatz is this year’s Festival d’Automne. I’m looking most forward to the psycho-perceptual genius playwright Nathalie Béasse new work Aux Eclats, a work she introduced as a WIP last Fall.

Perennials like Atelier de Paris and annuals like Festival d’Automne are not alone in opening in spite of different health-safety, programming and box-office challenges. Only under my hand here, among many other interior-only spaces, the privately-run La Scala Paris’ sophisticated contemporary performance space; the Palais de Chaillot’s Art Deco experience inside an esthetic experience and the gemütlich garden party atmosphere of Le Monfort in its nice little park way down south. Nathalie Béasse’s will open the 2020-21 program at Théâtre de la Bastille, intimate and polyvalent, a theater’s theater’s typical theater, with a nice little bar, too.

Right now at Chaillot you could see, free, among the expressionist splendor, Jann Gallois and Emmanuel Gat rehearsing absolutely new performances. At end of September, there’s the Echelle humaine dance-performance program in the tight and very unconventional space of Lafayette Anticipations. Echelle Humaine is also part of the Festival d’Automne’s performance program. There’s also the reprise of Micadanses with its Bien fait! program of new and in-progress work in the dance-school’s Arthaud-type basement space.

And there’s more quality work in quality venues starting up outside Paris such as the Ballet de Lorraine in the lovely 18^thcentury town of Nancy. The eclectic intelligence of a program of Tharp, Tokugawa and Cunningham – For Four Walls, Flot, Transparent Monster, Plaisirs inconnus, The Fugue… – tells you all you need to know about the Lorraine ballet.