The Best American Poetry

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.

The return of the mountebanks to Paris: the imperative pleasure of live performance [by Tracy Danison]

A mountebank tries her hand for the Compagnie Gwénaël Morin’s “Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies” performance, which opened the post-lockdown season in Paris. Photo©Emile Zeizig/mascarille.com

Yeah baby, I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that …  - I Like It by Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin, 2018                                                      

The brakes on Karine’s electric bike squeak abominably as I twist nervously through Vincennes and Montreuil, pedaling back from the Atelier de Paris, behind the Parc Floral in the Bois de de Vincennes. The morning is still grey. It’s about 8. Poor thing. The bike, I mean. I’ve taken it because it’s an advantage when I’m up early, feeling old and living in a city humpy and made narrowly but with broad ideas, like Paris.

Compagnie Gwénaël Morin open Atelier’s season with a dawn performance of his Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies (my guesses : “One bizarre moment more” or, maybe, “In one brain, many moments bizarre”). The performance knits together Ajax, Antigone and Heracles. Distraught, determined, destined, each was responsible for their own death.

Dawn is just the right note to open on in the Covid-era; there’s a new day between sun up and sundown –  anything is possible. I think “rosy-fingered dawn”, Odyssey, Odysseos. I laugh, remembering swotting Greek. I remember that every single day begins all on its own… Live Dance does that, too – I think of Morin’s piece as “Dance”, for instance, because I’ve concluded all “performance” grows from the fundamental art of Dance. Dance begins and proceeds and beginsunique, like the days of our lives, like remembering, like the reincarnating soul is said to do.

This apprehension of its one-time-only quality is why live Dance is as universally sacred as it is profane. The Catholic Mass is a Dance of Remembrance, Passion and Resurrection; the Passion is the mother of plays and all true mountebanks. Playing Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies as the sun rises is a natural homage to the Dance in ourselves.

We onlookers are masked-up, raggedly distanced, flopped or tailor-legged or leant against the bigger trees in a trampled little meadow just outside the doors of Cartoucherie’s Aquarium theater. Local families often gather here for soccer and impromptu picnics. The rain this morning hesitates often enough that, playing or looking on, the performance stays outside throughout, damp but not soaked.

Fat grey clouds roll above as we look on. Lit by one giant globe lamp, the stage is carved from onlookers by a circle of reddish DayGlo spray paint, dimensioned by a big board on which somebody has written “AJAX ANTIGONE HERAKLES”. Twenty-something mountebanks in jeans, one cream molding-sack dress, sneakers, some in ponchos, one bare-chested, chorus, fall on their own sword, just say ‘no’ to wrongness and finesse their own pyre, all with pomp and style that wouldn’t surprise Sophocles or Molière.

The house offers coffee and croissants after.

Back on the e-bike, I am wondering, Is Gwénaël Morin’s piece suggesting we are responsible for our deaths as well as our dreams, bêtises and attendant guilts?

Wishing to get around a delivery truck in a narrow street, I take the curb too much lengthwise, take unwingèd flight, bang and abrade brow ridge, knee and nose. My good old left hand doesn’t stop the pavement from recreating me an old, has-been Palooka, but she does save me. She’s throbbing like a bastard but fully mobile. Likely just a strain. I’m not ambidextrous, but I lead left, often. Karine responds to Palooka’s post-beating selfie: “Bist du zuuuu schnell gefahren?”, a variant of an offhand “Bist du sicher?”. Then she asks after her e-bike.

The incident is worth every bruise, however. I’m hysterically glad to get back in among the mountebanks in spaces that were uncomfortable before fear of getting this viral salopérie gave us all these experiments in national lockdown, masks and social distancing.

With little exceptions, like a particular music-dance video or two (for instance, Philip Chbeeb & René Kester) and a drowsy appreciation of TV butt, cleavage, bump and grind as I stretch along Karine as she watches her Saturday-night ballroom dance TV contest, Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies is the first live performance I’ve set eyes on since 15 March 2020.

And, if the pandemic has proved one thing to my satisfaction, it’s that, even snuggled up to my honey-squeeze and drowsily appreciative of the family-rated content, un-live and un-in-person, audio-visual reproduction of Dance-performance can’t work for me. It’s physical and also intellectual – “moral”, in the French sense of the word.

Not by accident or even disdain, I haven’t had a TV since I left home for good in 1972. The flicker rate of TV and films make me feel weird – in the old days an “alienist” would have said “alienated”, like one feels in the first few moments of an acid trip. I have to steel myself to see a film. This may seem to you “odd”. It probably seems “unusual” but not “odd” that I also taste all sweeteners but sugar as bitter, hear very high-pitched sounds like dog whistles, am 65 years old and do not need glasses, though I can’t spontaneously tell my left from my right.

For me, the long and short of the effects of audio-visual technology on people is that people are naturally very variable and sensitive to the movements and evolutions of the world around. It stands to reason that the variability and sensitivity would extend to the technological environment. For the rest, a brother of mine was in a rocket attack that blew out his ear drums, burned his skin and drove a bone splinter from a comrade deep into his body. The experience left him permanently “nervous”. When it came to compensation, there was much ink exchanged over whether his was mental or physical disability. I’ve concluded that when we say “unusual”, we mean we don’t want to say not much is known about humans or the rest of the natural world and “odd” when a we don’t want to know about it.

I like the content of the recorded and reproduced performance as much as I do live performance content. Sometimes, even more. But, intellectually, reasoning from experience and values, not only do I suspect that audio-visual reproduction technology is the source of a number of psychic ills subtler than my own marginal schizophrenia, I also feel certain that the technology does not reproduce, but rather produces a thing quite different from the once-and-only that is the soul of Dance performance.

Physically – psychically, intellectually – morally, live Dance-performance is just not the same as recorded or reproduced performance. In the future, we need to better value that difference.

Musing Terpsichore at the Regard du Cygne: “Ma Robe” on the blood-red Recamier [by Tracy Danison]

Zoe Salmon performs “Ma Robe”, Regard du Cygne, Paris, 8 March 2020, Photo©Morena Compani

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”.

                                                                                        - Isadora Duncan

The moment bizarre is not over, of course, until live performance starts up again and this here (now) fat boy loses the five pounds he put on during lockdown. Still, in all, what with the salutary correction in the Weltgeist and a change in direction in categorical imperatives, things do seem to be looking up.

As I have since mid-March I spend long periods on the blood-red Recamier, golden pillow under my head, hearing my heart throb and gazing at the ceiling. My own analyst. My own analysand.  As I lie gazing, my Persönlichergeist has often been full of Isadora Duncan, the (re)founder of dance in the modern world. Yes, she is.

Duncan’s autobiography and Jérôme Bel’s Portrait dansé of Isadora Duncan, wonderfully done up by the excellent Elisabeth Schwartz marked me in 2019 as did the performer Ruth Childs, dancing her first solo, fantasia, who gets mixed in with my reflections on the sense of “dance” sense.  

The last venue I was at before the lockdown in mid-March this year was Regard du Cygne, a dance-performance theater space in the Belleville neighborhood, metro Télégraphe or Jourdain. Amy Swanson, the founder and guiding spirit of the place, like Elisabeth Schwartz, is a practitioner of dance in the Isadora Duncan tradition. One of the last things I saw performed at Regard du Cygne was Swanson’s piece Ma Robe (“my robe, my dress, my gown”). Robe’s wordless universal sense and personal sensibility in performance recall what I’ve been thinking Duncan is all about.

Blood-red Recamier with golden pillow

In her performance of the piece, Zoé Salmon enchants the audience by elegantly uprising her approximate six feet through about 30 yards of heavy gown fabric. She somehow gets across both complex senses of “becoming”: “right and lovely” and “evolving”. And, thereby, somehow, she opens up a vision of the becoming world for witness.

But really, the success of Ma Robe – the sense, it seems to me, to Duncan’s idea of dance – is its ability to appeal to a shared conviction that, “danced”, a robe-dress-gown points to the centrality of self – yours, mine, their – in our world.

Everybody – I, my companion, Karine, the little girls sitting behind and around me, their moms and dads, as well as the other adults in the audience, recognized and accepted that Salmon’s rising so personally, so elegantly, up through Ma Robe was (is), really-truly, the universe becoming.

Real  invitation. Photo: Ana Belén Cantero Paz

Terpsichore’s – and Duncan’s – art treat a level of complexity Aristotle and Thomas Carlyle just never imagined. What happens at “dance” (maybe at all live performance) resembles what Saint Augustine said could only be true at the Eucharist: the wine and bread are body and blood, the gown is the universe, the thing represented is the thing itself.

So, as at a Eucharist, Ma Robe’s audience’s shared conviction of witness is not dramatic, is not theatrical, has nothing to do with a “suspension of disbelief” to achieve catharsis, the necessary evacuation of the emotional toxins generated by a set of beliefs. Think of the psychic poison generated by the beliefs that underpin Oedipus the King! Motherfucker!

When we witness “dance” as Isadora Duncan meant it, on the other hand, we are connecting with our capacity (and responsibility) for the sets of belief that construct the world we live in. Think, “connection” and “identification”: kids playing house or a toddler echoing words, trying out a relation or a tool or just trying out the capacity to construct a reality.

So, here is a post-moment bizarre conclusion from the blood-red Recamier.

Before the moment bizarre, I would have said that Isadora Duncan understood my life is movement is dance. No more. I now say that Duncan took “dance” for granted as Emily Dickinson took “poetry” for granted, as Ralph Waldo Emerson took “personhood” for granted. As it never occurred to the (re)founders of poetry and spirituality that poetry might be a function of “language” or that a human being could be other than her own subject, it just never occurred to Duncan that “dance” was other than dance. Terpsichore’s name, after all, means “delight in dance”, and her iconography, sitting with a lyre held up as if a portal, invite her admirers beyond sight and sound to vision and feeling.

The meaning of standing [by Tracy Danison]

Beach at Jaffa, Israel, during lockdown©Felice Ross 2020

Sacred.

Between earth and sky.

Connected.

Holding hands.

Reaching down.

Stretching up.

Eye and see.

You. In the middle.

A bird on a branch on a leaf on a tree.

A fish in water in a river to a sea.

Life and body.

Me. In the middle.

Breath, air.

Sickness, death.

Us. Between 

Sacred. 

Connected.

 

Notes from confinement: on silence and altering states [by Tracy Danison]

C'mon, c'mon let's merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!

Merry-Go-Round (1968), Wild Man Fischer 

There were said to be too many new joggers, so at some point they forbid us to go outside between 10 am and 7 pm, except for shopping.

At 8 pm sharp, my neighbors are at their windows and on their balconies, clapping, calling and pounding pots and pans. Monsieur le Président de la République, Emmanuel Macron, begins a pretty fair speech at 8.02 pm. He thanks everyone for their tenacious civic solidarity and the police for its vigilance. Macron says we can look forward to phased liberation from confinement beginning 11 May. If all goes well.

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier performs her 1917th one-minute dance. She began the project in January 2015 as “poetic resistance” to barbarity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre. She’s put together a site, Danses de confinement, which has so far put more than 500 minute-dance contributions on line.

Today a year ago, I walked out of the Châtelet Métro station, looked up to see Notre Dame burning. I had no idea stone could burn and so fiercely too. It turns out the place was a thousand-year-old pile seasoned oak.

Valentine Nagata-Ramos, is a dancer and starting-up choreographer whose Cie Uzumaki dance troupe brings together manga culture – Uzumaki, “Spiral”, is a horror series written and drawn by Junji Ito  – hip-hop, feminism and her own unique background and presence.

Valentine has been putting her social media house in order lately and seems as cheerful as usual. If dates for Fall 2020 hold up, it looks like she has good prospects for her BE-girl dance project, which was rolling along sweetly before they banned live performance.

These are gorgeous lingering evenings upon gorgeous lengthening days, pretty warm and dry for April.

Karine tells me she just met Marek walking with his handicapped boy. They live just behind her little house. Marek’s a child dentist. Father like son is enjoying confinement. It’s very positive, they say. It makes everybody realize everything is connecting. Connected? O! Sorry. We’re all the earth, we mean.

At some point in the fuzzy-tough week before Macron’s speech – that would be toward the fourth week of confinement, Holy Week, Pessach, what have you – the WhatsApp streams of funny videos, neighborly sentiment and ironies suddenly dried up.

Somehow or another in there, Silence just fell over all our little worlds.

I think the Aspidistra crash landed – remember Orwell’s image for the “everyday determination of everyday people” that keeps a body going in face of petty cruelties, hard work and dog shit on the sidewalk? I think it experienced a mechanical failure; Men in Black have discretely wheeled the partially burned carcass into a secure revetment.

I got two messages before Silence fell.

The first was a short video from Sina Saberi, my choreographer friend currently stuck in his home country.

Like most performing artists, Sina’s been trying to distract himself from the fact of severely unpaid hours imposed by the world-wide public health emergency. To fill in the moments between renewed anxieties, he’s been learning how to use a video editing app to help him develop a project he’s been seriously toying with for a while. He wanted to show me the fruits of this labor.

The second message was from Ludovine, lioness apostle of the solitary walk and the breathless run, whom I loved upon hearing her whiskey voice, who moved to a new and charming country village a day or two before mandatory confinement began.

Ludovine had heaved a sigh of relief that 15 March when she got her key and shut her new front door against all comers – Ooouuff! What joy to be rid of people, especially the nearer ones, she messaged then.

Ludovine now confesses that the sparkle of diaphanous aloneness has dulled to featureless loneliness. I understand now, she texts, that I must hold whom I love in my arms – without it, no space, no horizons, no nothing.

Sina’s short video shows an uncertain dervish small on a distanced stage flailing and staggering into twirling swirling twirling swirling. He writes that the dervish is part of Basis for being,  a choreography project that looks at dance as an alternate state of being, part of a “biography of being”. Basis aspires to be a mirror that enables experience and desire as being.

Watching the dervish find his whirl swirl on the tiny screen, I recall a chance meeting with the Venerable Nyanadharo, the chief of some Buddhist forest monks living in a homely monastery at Tournon-sur-Rhône, in the Ardêche. Don’t ask.

Vénérable told me that turning, staying awake and fasting, among other ordinary human practices, constraints and habits, are sufficient ways out of standard consciousness – other consciousness is as common as skin, he said. Like for yoga, what matters is intention. Vénérable insisted on that.

It’s not necessary to dine with a notable forest monk to get this point, however. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s daily one-minute of dance, Valentine Nagato-Ramos’ BE-girls, too, take the conscious-altering power of dance for granted … Come to think of it, Isadora Duncan didn’t invent modern dance, she rescued dance so that Sina and Nadia and Valentine and Ruth Childs and Amy Swanson and … you and I, could continue to use it.

That’s why Silence fell, then, why the Aspidistra crashed to earth. Confinement is a sufficient way out of standard consciousness. 

Silence marked a paradigm shift: sometime between Ash Wednesday and Easter Monday, even my lioness friend Ludovine realized that we already are connected. What we see as we press our noses to the windows is really what our desire enables. Experience should enable us to change it.

What now? 

“Ce moment bizarre”: a note on confinement and afterwards [by Tracy Danison]

A Tale from the Decameron (1916) by John William Waterhouse

On Wednesday, 2 April, the number of Covid-19 cases in France as a whole, formally diagnosed in an institution or with symptoms serious enough to get them taken into care, stands at 59,105. At a total of 4,503 deaths so far, Covid 19-related mortality is reported as 10% every 24 hours. In Ile de France, the region of Paris and its suburbs, there are 10,273 people hospitalized, up 63% since 28 March. Of these, 2,301, about 23%, are in intensive care.

Government strategy has assumed that the population had already been largely exposed to the virus by the time it began to take action. It has depended on mandatory confinement to slow rates of infection in the general public. Confinement has now been extended to 15 April. The ministry for health also announced plans to make testing widely available, linking it to a gradual wind down of general confinement. As for a possible end-date, the prime minister told parliament not to hold its breath.

A Decameron to call my own

Call me Boccaccio.

As in 1348, I just have to hunker down and wait it out, hoping I won’t be too poor to buy food and shelter when I can finally come out.

I am lonely, too.

WhatsApp and Facebook, Skype, jet planes, virus tests, free hospitals, big armies, on-line shopping, rational government, drones, shared posts, tech billionaires and free money don’t unmake the one any more than the science behind them has been able to undo the need for confinement. 

Sometime after Tuesday, 17 March, morning – I can’t really say how much time after because I was so wrapped up in a time-gobbling scramble to put “on-line” the classes I teach – the everyday economy stopped and most of the usual noises off stopped along with it.

It was in that undefinable time between Tuesday morning, then, that I, they, he, she, you, we began living ce moment bizarre, this weird time.

“This”. As if pointing toward an ineffably complicated dream that hangs on and hangs on just out of the reach of sense, well after sleep has gone.

Social distance

“Us”. In the stairwells and on the stoops, the neighbors and I realized we were hunkered down together. We wondered on the landings and in the little kid play area how best to social distance. Some unexplored magic transfigured the guy downstairs, the Bulgarian ex-dancer, the lady on the landing the-one-with the-lap-dog-you-know, the couple on the second floor, the bus driver … Monsieur Barre de là-bas, en haut, and more that I have not yet come to suspect, became “us”.

“Them”. We closed ourselves to étrangers à la residence for the duration of the health emergency. Somebody made up some bureaucratic-looking signs that tell them so. Now we have the view of our Atlas mountain conifers and root-knotted greensward all for our own eyes. Still, in the night, I sometimes hear rumors of music muffled, of warm, of heroic, talk, of giggles, of grunts, of the unmistakable clinks of crystal glasses refilled, of surreptitious feet, of sudden sharp midnight creaks on the stairs.

Somehow we decided to do like the Italians and Spaniards: Make some noise. So, at 8pm the us I’ve described go to the windows and onto balconies and applaud into the expanding twilight. It feels good to me. I’m stuck here. I look forward to it.

So, thinking that since he lives in Iran, where I imagine a body might need more cheering up than in less beset locations, it might cheer him up too, I suggested applauding to Sina Saberi. Sina is an admirable singer, actor and choreographer of contemporary performance as well as a person I like a lot.

Sina naturally asked me, What exactly we were applauding? To tell you the truth, the question once asked, I was flummoxed. All the same, I quickly tapped back: “Life”.

Applauding at my window, I see people and they see me. A figure who lives up high in B1 and I have recently begun waving. “Life”, apparently, (also) means showing I am, we are, alive.

At some point in the time since Tuesday, they closed the frontiers, canceled my train and now want papers I can’t get if I want to travel anyway. And were I to walk, as I swear to Karine I shall if, that would be bootless too. They have put armed police, big ruffians, most of them, at all the major crossroads.

I am not a miss-you, miss-you sort of person and I prefer, on the whole, being alone. But I do miss Karine now, after more than two weeks.

Every time I wake, it seems there is some new obstacle to seeing her again.

A dram of Grief has somehow distilled in the simple of Absence. There comes of this an alchemical solvent of despair and defiance, that, in contact with confinement here, boils up into desperation.

I wonder what other alchemies are fizzing and popping in all those figures I am sure to glimpse only once a day?

From the windows and balconies, on the landings, on the playgrounds, we say that things have now changed forever. So when ce moment bizarre moment finally sloughs off, what shape will the new world have, what shall we do about what is to be done there? What story will we then tell?

Hang on to your hats.

Be well. Stay safe.

Plato’s ghost! Gaiety shoots the moon, Paris bans illusion, dismisses mountebanks [by Tracy Danison]

It's all up in the air for Christina Towle's "Bounce Back" – Photo © Timothée Lejolivet

And she'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away
(Fun, fun, fun, 'till her daddy takes the T-bird away)

- Fun, Fun, Fun, Mike Love & Brian Wilson (1964)

Late-afternoon, Friday, 13 March, the day they shut the schools and universities, Karine and I were watching choreographer Christina Towle rehearse a new piece she calls Bounce Back at Regard du Cygne performance studio.

Towle’s Bounce Back piece shows basketball as movement rather than game. Good idea, good show. Intriguing dramatic challenge, too.

We did not know then that this was the last dance piece we would be seeing for an unforeseeable future.

We did not know that “bounce back” might apply to our future hopes as well as to basketball. We did not know that, as we sat, Gaiety was shooting the moon, stiffing the help, taking the last train out.

To help slow the exponential spread of Covid-19, they had shut the bigger theaters, performance, athletic and leisure spaces, with a single decree effectively laying off most, but not all, performing artists and entertainers in the Paris, in France.

As we were leaving, a guy from city hall came to discuss Regard du Cygne’s fate with Towle – a performer and choreographer, she is also the studio’s programming chief.

Karine and I speculated on that as we walked home.

Saturday night, 14 March, Karine and I ate late in a crowded brasserie. The supper was meant as a cheering goodbye. Karine had decided to go home early the next day.

The little boy-girl duo of barely-legal servers were urging another drink on us; not something servers usually do in this country.

Enjoy it while you can, the boy said, They have shut us all down from tomorrow morning.

It’s true? Karine asked the girl. For once, she said, smiling, Honor bright.

The brasserie was stuffed with anxious, youngish foreigners speaking English of every native and international accent. Students? IT people? Tourists?

While we were guzzling extra-large portions – waste not, want not – and swilling those last blushful Hippocrenes, the authorities shut down the goddam gyms.

This hit home. A key element in the Nine Circles of Life, Gym is enthroned in Movement but has at least a modest claim to a stool in Conversation, Desire, Pleasure, Open Heart, Good Humor, Reason, Imagination and Fair Dealing. I met Karine at Gym.

Next morning, Sunday, 15 March, I saw her off.

The weather was as fine as it gets on a 15 March along the 49th parallel, north; for some reason, I just love the walk down from Gare de l’est to République.

Since there was no rush to have any old how now, I threaded down to the canal, figuring to double back to République by a deliberate and circuitous route made short, sweet and straight by Movement and Imagination.

People were already out in their droves enjoying the warm sunshine. No sort of social distance at all. As usual, they were casually close, grasping paws, rubbing muzzles, giving and getting those friendly little blow-on-the-cheek kisses. 

Even approving social distance now, as I certainly do, I have long approved social closeness, this touchy-feeliness among friends, family, neighbors and work partners, the old and the young. Doing distance when closeness is so obviously better takes practice – it’s plumb tough to turn aside a neighbor’s handshake, let alone turn aside his toddler’s dimpled hand and shy little smooch.

Under the bright sun, in the warming air, feeling well rhythmed in the rhyme of this agreeable 75^th episode of 2020’s Comédie humaine series, I decided to walk all the way home.

I made sure to pass through Père Lachaise. I went in the front, took a right, climbed a bit and went out the secret door in the eastern wall to the wild garden, what is said to be the last truly natural patch of Paris.

I felt like seeing what kind of life was wiggling in the little pool of troubled water that gathers on the weedy brim of the patch. More than a bit of a ghoul, it tickles me to think the seep of the cemetery’s moldering citizens, Balzac surely among them, is the trouble in the water that nourishes the brackish little pool – waste not, want not.

It was early evening before I got home, as I suppose it was for everybody else.

Sunday’s citizen snuggle-bunnies, the apparent reigning légerèté d’esprit and obvious inconsequence, were said to have riled Monsieur le Président de la République, Emmanuel Macron. That it riled him is not surprising, but I don’t think, as some evil wags mutter, it affected what was to follow.

While Mrs. Macron’s wunder-boy is surely no fool, he is rather too-earnest, even pinched-up. He’s the kind of fellow inclined to think that closing cafés, forcing parents and children to spend more time together, keeping proper social distances and a generous dash of Darwinian struggle will improve morals as well as health outcomes. This is why Monsieur le Président has the costly habit of getting it so damned wrong even when he’s damned right.

At the report I received on Monday, 16 March, Regard du Cygne, like that brave little radio station in the War of the Worlds, was still open. And like that brave little station’s lone reporter, I told myself, with a wry chuckle of course, Regard du Cygne yet promulgated the human spirit in the face of the terrifying, silent marauder from afar …

Tuesday morning, 17 March, I went to get a 3-liter box of wine – at this point in my life, waist-line be damned, I need wine more than admiration.

I found long, straggly lines at each of the three local supermarkets and the two exotic markets in the neighborhood.

To judge from their overflowing Ikea carrier bags, shoppers seemed to buy a lot of noodles and chicken. Peering into the windows showed there was plenty of toilet paper to come back for later, so I went back home, empty-handed.

My email announced they had closed Regard du Cygne until further notice.

Plato’s ghost! Thus, a world-historical achievement! From the City banned, Representation, Illusion and mountebanks, big and small!

Death of one Age or Birth of another?  Or just more careless slouching toward Jerusalem?

Anyhow, for the next couple weeks, they were going to have more say over my doings than usual.

But. So What? I haven’t got any say over the pandemic. Why shouldn't they imagine they do? Far better I can blame them for its inconveniences, then, than be forced to accidentally blame myself for what neither I nor they can really do piddle about.

Valeria Giuga. How’s a 60s rockstar to be done on Airstrip One? [by Tracy Danison]

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris

I found myself feeling slightly shamed to be clapping so hard and enthusiastically at the finish of Valeria Giuga’s clever and thoughtful dance performance Rockstar at Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Around me, too many fellow spectators showed off that peculiar form of un-enthusiasm that signals disapproval rather than, say, disappointment.

The mechanics of Rockstar work well.

It has all it takes and not too much of it, either. Rockstar is easy to enjoy.

The Rockstar scenario, its light, music and choreography all roll out smoothly.

An amorphous musical frame doubled by a soft-light visual frame supports a heavy-duty weft and warp of three danced all-time hit-parade toppers: Papa Was a Rolling Stone (The Temptations, 1972), Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode, 1989) and Fame (David Bowie, 1975). Giuga consistently creates an atmosphere that is playful and not-quite distracting, not-quite hypnotic …  

Come to think of it, her creation manages to evoke an emotional something very much like what rockstars create, at least the ones I’ve seen on TV…

Finally, a professional in full possession, Valeria Giuga dances supremely well. If her choreography got me thinking “rockstar”, her personal style got me feeling Peter Robert Auty’s version of “Walking in the Air”.

We’re floating in the moonlit sky/… I’m finding I can fly so high above with you/…

Suddenly, swooping low, on ocean deep/Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep!

Resentfully, I redoubled my enthusiasm.

It happens to me often enough that I don’t appreciate what those around me seem to. Also, like other people, often enough I can’t say why I can’t appreciate a perfectly well-constructed piece.

The point of live work, after all, is that it’s fully and directly relational: feeling and sense before, during and after performance count. Like psychoanalysis, the underlying scenario of live performance is Life, capital L.

Sullenly mulling the contrast between my enthusiasm and other spectators’ un-enthusiasm got me associating that, when I was a little boy, I also used to feel shamed that neither of my grandfathers had gone asoldiering.

Feeling shamed is a fact, a natural fact, like fun.

A sculptor told me with a straight face he did wood because there warn’t no metal on Tobacco Road. He then threw back his glass of sparkling wine, with feeling.

I was born on Airstrip One. There shame and honor reigns. Going for a soldier was – to echo the Barry Goldwater slogan – a duty, not a choice. In those “post-war” days – before active shooter drills – cringed under my school desk, my cowardly trembling as I breathed hot and quick the air of Victory, Fire, Ash and Dust of the second world war shamed me too.

Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Mrs. Needoh, the fourth-grade teacher, worried aloud whether the nearby Vulcanized^Ò rubber factories had adequate ack-ack. Feu my brother was shamed for telling me, That woman is crazy. Was he shamed because he spoke out of turn, said the shaming phrase to littler boys, called Mrs. Needoh that woman or called Mrs. Needoh crazy? Yes, obvious, chastisement, inevitable.

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

On Airstrip One, as victory is ashes, as success is just darn successful, time is as a seamless garment.

Seamlessness makes the present appear an obvious inevitability – shaming them as might not see it right off.

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris 

Like lubricious Lenina’s zipless overalls, on the brave new world of Airstrip One, seamlessness facilitates successful pneumatics, whether worked on you or by you. Either way, it’s shameful to say.

Shame is as shame does. Seamlessness facilitates natural doublefeel by creating the past as just another unconscious space in which to displace the inconvenient part of mixed emotions.

Mixed emotions are also a fact, a natural fact. Seamlessly joined with the present as Eve to Adam’s rib, on Airstrip One the Past is that damned spot on a favorite dress concealing the ecstasy of unexpected love in a fog of anguished expostulation.

The glow of the Past is the waste heat of contradictory emotions, the product of doublefeel, feeling one thing while knowing everyone else’s feeling, one’s own racially-healthy feeling, must be true.

How can one personal feeling be so much at odds with obvious, inevitable Airstrip One?

What was that unnameable natural fact that kept my grandfathers – limber, stiff, generous, miserly, gruff, bluff, suspect, upright malchiks – from bounden duty on the Malabar front?

So was it that I felt shamed as I clapped hard for Rockstar; I was not of them but must feel with them even now that that I no longer have the energy for it. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

The point is that Rockstar doesn’t rockstar as it must. That’s where the un-enthusiasm comes from.

Rockstar (plural rockstars)

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity
2. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment. 
3. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renowned amongst others of its type.

                        "Owls are the rockstars of the bird world".                                                                                                                                  - Wiktionary

Good show it may be but Rockstar does not feel “rockstar”, as a fixed term, an icon of canonical parts. Indeed, until that moment of shame and un-enthusiasm, I wonder if anyone had thought that this natural facts of the 60s had canonical parts.

Try these citations for rough analysis of what I mean:

“Rockstar”

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity status : Papa Was a Rolling Stone ’s most salient line is “… and when he died, all he left us was alone”.
2. A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment : Personal Jesus hints at, among other unsavory stuff, commercialized dependency with, “Lift the receiver/ will make you a believer/ reach and touch faith”.
3. Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renownedamongst others of its type: Fame brings together you and he, megalomania and nowhere: “Fame, makes a man take things over/ Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow /Fame, puts you there where things are hollow”.

                                "Vultures are the rockstars of the bird world."

Freddie Mercury? Mick Jagger? Cher? Patti Smith?

Maybe I and my fellow spectators discovered the dissonance all together and all at once, I feeling shame and they feeling sour. I can’t know.

What I can say is that Rockstar raised in me an interesting past and many interesting feelings that make it; it did that for my fellow spectators as well: Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia? Is that good? Or bad? And how is it?

For me, that’s certainly art or part of it. For that matter, so is my feeing shamed.

Remember that Australian bush hunter in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park?

Just before that frighteningly intelligent velociraptor rips him to hamburger, he admiringly grunts “Attagirl!”

Attagirl! Valeria.

 

 

 

Taming “digital art”: Gaïté Lyrique chooses cultural context

Where, when, who for?: Adrien M. & Claire B., “Faire Corps” © Romain Etienne

Until the other day I associated with the Gaïté Lyrique with music & sophisticated light and sound shows; last year, among many others, the venue featured the inimitable Alice Phoebe Lou  and a fifth annual music-film festival (F.A.M.E). So it was really good to see Adrien M. & Claire B’s digitally-generated Faire Corps (“All Together”) installation – material sculpture, virtual visual, public and performance interaction, sound, music and environments.

Even more through-provoking, in some ways, than the Faire Corps installation – which is proving a big attraction – was to hear Jos Auzende, Gaïté Lyrique’s artistic programmer, take the opportunity of the Faire Corps opening to clearly place “digital” in the context of culture and creative achievement.

Nearly 10 years ago, the city of Paris re-inaugurated the historic Gaïté Lyrique – Jacques Offenbach was once its director and Diaghelev started his Ballets Russes there – as a “center for digital art and culture”, without, I think, knowing what that could mean.

Now, Auzende seems to say, just as we all see Fantasia as the achievement of Walt Disney animators and storytellers working, say, in a “pre-empire Americanization culture”, not just as the result of applying color-film technology, so we should see that the achievement and interest in digitally generated work such Adrien M. & Claire B.’s lies not in how, but in where, when, for whom they have re-invented or appropriated digital technology to make it work.

Taking a stand for cultural context as the primary lens through which to look at esthetic achievement where contemporary digital technology is involved seems to me really challenging.

For music, for example, no matter how it is generated, we take the centrality of creation and culture for granted. “Digital music” means “music generated using digital technology”, not “music that is (somehow) digital”; it is indeed hard to think of any music generated in any way that is not essentially viewed and critiqued through its cultural context.

But, when it comes to “digital art”, the same casual assumption of cultural primariness is not true. People do often mean “art that is digital”, dropping culture all together and identifying the creation with the technology the creators used to achieve it.

A Simulation: Adrien M. & Claire B., “Organismes Typographiques” © Laurence Fragnol

The tendency to squeeze creation and culture into the tool is due, partly, I think, to intense commercial promotion of digitalized stuff (saleable) and digital uses (rentable), of course. But more especially, I think, digital technology is seen to be and is presented as, a competitor to humans.

Contemporary digital technology simulates human physical and mental movement: repetitive gestures such as driving or abstract processes such as judgment. Most funded digital R&D in industry and entertainment (and a lot of institutionally-funded Middle and high-brow art) turns around substituting digital technology for (saleable) movement and behaviors: slicing off and splicing up bits of recorded human movement and converting it into a saleable catalogue of products, services, tasks and processes – think consumer-service robots, virtual reality video, micro-targeted advertising, automatic public security identification.

It is not just difficult to get people to look at digital technology (or any technology for that matter) through the lens of cultural achievement. Looking at anything is to betray critical interest. Looking at digital technology through a culture – from where, when, for whom – is automatically “political”: what kind of cultural context generates a market for automatic public facial recognition; what kind of people systematically mistake the mediums for messages and vice versa?

In terms of intention, achievements and content, in Faire Corps, Jos Auzende chose a good talking piece for her speech.

As creators, Adrien M. & Claire B. declare an intention to “resist corporate colonialism”, inciting creators and audiences alike to remember both that digital technology is just technology and that, just as for other technologies, who controls and who uses digital determines why and how it gets used.

Adrien M. & Claire B. take digital technology use a step further than, say, a savvy contemporary choreographer such as Mourad Merzouki would do. Comparison of Merzouki’s dance-performance Pixel and Adrien M. & Claire B.’s sound-movement-performance Equinoxe speaks to their will to move away from technology as show-enhancement and -support to technology as sensory interaction with the show (without its becoming virtual reality). Pixel’s wow-me tech stuff was created by Adrien M. & Claire B.

Overall, each of the different parts of the Faire Corps installation, much like the Equinoxe performance piece, emphasizes sensory interactions with its onlookers. But each of its magic lanterns, its pools, patterns and projections suggests increased potential creative interface and esthetic interest in available technology.

Auzende’s Gaïté Lyrique’s approach to “digital art and culture” come in the context of a recent change of management – the current energetic director, Laëtitia Stagnara, was appointed only at the end of 2018. She has apparently determined to use Gaïté Lyrique’s existing noos: Jos Auzende, for example, is the originator of the theater’s popular children’s arts workshop Les Voyages du Capitaine Futur, billed, unsurprisingly, as “art taming technology”. Stagnara was formerly in charge of “digital development” at Cité des sciences et de l'industrie (La Villette). La Villette does a notably good job of getting past wow-me promotion of amazing (must have) technology to actually popularize science and technical achievement.

My hat is off to Jos Auzende, Laëtitia Stagnara and the esthetic team at Gaïté Lyrique.

Wonders never cease: François de Brauer’s “La Loi des prodiges”, a performed graphic novel [by Tracy Danison]

François de Brauer, La Loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) © Victor Tonelli 

I heard on the radio that a bartender in New York has proposed clarity & truth as 2020’s watchword. Sounds good to me. You first. Ready. Set. Go!

I am one of those people who smile all the time, even sleeping, even toting a machine gun. In spite of everything; the smile reflects my true feeling; I’m with Isadora Duncan, feeling is all that really counts.

But neither smile nor feeling reflects what I actually think about things in the round.

Once, when I cautiously let her in on one of my thinkings, my late Mother burst into tears, sobbing out, What cynicism! I was 18 then, bless me, already a soldier. My Mother was among the most fully-integrated hypocrites who ever walked Yahweh’s Stony yet Righteous path. Rightly, I believe, I took her outburst for sign and portent; a thinking is mostly better left unspoken.

Lately, my thinking has been affecting my feeling.

I’ve been darkly thinking, for instance, that life might very well be a play – a story, fairy tale, novel, opéra, musical comedy – in which I’ve failed to play my assigned role.

Don’t get me wrong. I love narrative. But narrative is just a tool of art, an interesting wart on the clitoris that is Life. Narrative just ends up; Life becomes.

That’s why the non-narrativeness of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard), an absorbing two-hour one-man show that I saw not long since at La Scala Paris has very nearly brought me around to renewed smilingkeit. La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard, a veritable feat of thespian endurance and mastery, is scenarized and performed by François de Brauer, rather new to the dramatic scene but certainly upcoming.

I am not sure how to translate La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard). I can’t decide whether the prodiges are natural wonders or human prodigies. In France, a certain fetishistic pedantism means that laws get reformed rather than changed or replaced, or even dreamt up or projected. A réforme commonly carries the name of an individual guilty of proposing it, presumably so that he or she may be punished for sticking his or her neck out later, when nobody’s looking.

So, the title’s all very dense, as they say, and so is the piece itself. But good dense: “with depth that entertains”. La Scala has the knack of good dense. As I write, I’m thinking of, last year, among others, Machine de cirque’s breathtaking acrobacy within an entirely different framework of dramatic success or Anne de Mey’s wonderful Cold Blood multimedia piece, also an absorbing meditation on theatrical technology and technique.

François de Brauer’s La loi des prodiges strikes me as a performed graphic novel. Taking on about 20 rôles – amazingly, one never once loses sight of who is who and who’s doing what – de Brauer creates complex situations such as protagonist Rémi Goutard’s birth, his Dad’s myth-scale rassle with the evil psychic twin who prevents his (Dad’s) suicide or young Rémi’s encounter with Duflou, a self-sealing blowhard and contemporary artist as well as an ambiguous friend of or to Dad.

The situations of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) swirl around a welter of life emotions. Both situations and emotions belong, and/or not, to the said Rémi Goutard, who, as it turns out, is a future former député whose réforme seeks to stamp out artistic creativity as well as artistic endeavor. All through and into the end, La loi des prodiges makes perfect sense. However, anything you might say about it is your own story.

The sense of having seen it through – rather than, say, having seen through it to some sort of (fundamentally moral) narrative structure – is why I scribbled “performed graphic novel” on my hand as I was leaving.

As in my experience of graphic novels, in La loi des prodiges de Brauer’s word is subject to his image. The image in turn has its finger on the emotion rather than the idea. And that’s how it should be, sometimes.

Wonders never cease – François de Brauer is somebody to watch for.

La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) – Performance • 2019 • François de Brauer • 110 minutes • La Scala Paris • Ω Conception & performance: François de Brauer / Artistic collaboration: Louis Arene, Joséphine Serre / Costuming: Christelle André / Lighting: François Menou / Production: Les Petites Heures – La Scala Paris

Mobilier National weaves together traditional techniques and new technologies [by Tracy Danison]

Detail, “Tree of Light”, OMA Space installation, Mobilier National 2019 © Jonathan Tanant

Paris by bike in a time of strike…

Passing by the Mobilier National warehouse, then swinging up under the elevated line... will actually shave a mile off my return journey, I pragmatically assure myself, slip the phone in my coat pocket, kick the pedal up and wobble off.

The reduction of my trip by a whole mile is much easier to explain than any product discount ever will be: distance is experience and, so, also elastic.

As I pedal along in my chosen city in its time of strikes, the usual nauseating taste of burnt petroleum byproduct gathering on my tongue, I am thinking that it is actually legal to make and sell and profit from whatever environmentally poisonous thing you want. Yet there are those who smirk and jeer at the naïve syllogism “distance is experience and experience is elastic”. Drôle de world, ours.

In no time at all, the Mobilier National (at 1, rue Berbier du Mets) slides into view.

“Tree of Light”, OMA Space © Jonathan Tanant

Mobilier National keeps on keeping on, having improvised itself through changes of dynasty, epoch and régime, massacre and siege, real and farcical revolution, coups d’état, budget cutbacks and pension reform. So, now, in addition to moving around the trappings of government, it runs the renowned tapestry and rug manufactures of the Gobelins, Beauvais and the Savonnerie, along with the national lace works in Puy-en-Vélay and Alençon. And, since France has long been a very strong – maybe the strongest global player in luxuries and luxury equipment and technique – think wine or … perfume bottles or … food logistics – Mobilier National also encourages and supports innovation in textile conception and production.The agency is to France what the US federal General Services Administration’s “Department, Sub, for Furnishings, Historical” would be had GSA been founded to serve the needs of an improvised medieval court.

“Notes and folds” , Amor Munoz © Jonathan Tanant

Housed in one of the finest and first examples of building with concrete (with an art deco style), Mobilier National is the state agency that provides classy furnishings to institutions such as ministries or embassies. Mobilier also develops techniques and technology around art conservation and restoration.

This past Fall, the innovation-support arm of the agency held its first public show of projects in hand: Prière de toucher le fil (“Please touch the thread”).

In addition to a monumental staircase (in case a medieval king-equivalent shows up, I reckon), false and real walls, corridors leading through architectural terrains vagues and discrete health and safety advice, there is sturdy three-tier shelving spread over three full walls. In the tiers, often wrapped in half an acre of bubble wrap, a visitor can’t help noticing – and wandering over to take a close look – at the love seats, chairs and occasional tables of well-upholstered eras past.Since 1, rue Berbier du Mets is a working warehouse, administrative center and now an arts de vivre showcase all in one, the exhibit space has an Ikea-on-Louvre air.

For those who fear President Emmanuel Macron’s monarchical tendencies, I can report that Napoleon’s seat – along with its imperial numen – remains unclaimed and undisturbed.

“Words weave Worlds”, Chloé Bensahel © Jonathan Tanant

Prière de toucher le fil – three installations showing off fabric embedded with ultrathin copper threads that, basically, make a touch screen out of the fabric– brought together Mobilier National’s expertise in Jacquard-technique weaving and Google-sponsored innovation in capacitance and capacitor technology.

Amor Munoz’s “Notes and folds” turned around player piano spools whose format creates an axis on which computer coding, music production and tactility come together.

An interactive “meditation walk” combining touch & sound with light, “Tree of Light”, designed by the collective Oma Space (Jang Jiu, Daniel Kapelian & Gil Kyoung) opened exploration of the technology’s possibilities. Different musical chords marked the moment as, led forward by a firefly light, the visitor’s bare foot found purchase on, among many different textures, a bark or silk or straw step.

Chloé Bensahel’s “Words weave Worlds” closed the show with a meditation on words and touch – stroking, poking or touching words produced different sounds, with different emotional resonances to the word.

In a word, Prière de toucher le fil was something unique – a way to understanding technology through the esthetics of sight, sound and touch. I am waiting on Mobilier National’s second exhibition. And so should you.

All the installations were created in cooperation with Google engineers during a Google Arts & Culture artist residency.

Photographer Benoîte Fanton’s dance vision: Get on up, hold on! [by Tracy Danison]

"L'Arène", from Don Quichotte de Trocadéro: Choreographer: Jose Montalvo/Performers: Sandra Mercky, Patrice Thibaud/Venue:Théâtre National de Chaillot, 2013

Monsieur Loyal commente

la ballerine s’évente

et pique la piste

en vrille

rouge banderille

                                              (MC Gayffier)

– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through

The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.

I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).

Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.

So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.

The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.

Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.

At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.

I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.

I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.

Get on up. Hold on.

Notes in a time of strike: the curatorial noos of “Futur, ancien, fugitif, une scène française” [by Tracy Danison]

Pierre Joseph: “Mur de mûres”, série “Photographie sans fin”, 2019: paper print. Photo: Aurélien Mole©Adagp 2019

Motivé, motivé / il faut se motiver / il faut rester motive / soyons motivé

                                                                                                       Le Chant des partisans – Zebda

If every demonstration by transport unions were a revolution I’d have bought myself, or, perhaps, been served, thousands of bowls of strawberries and cream by now. The duc d’Orléans’ machinations notwithstanding, common sense tells those with ears to hear that those who have never, ever, do Révolution.

No matter what the would be Révolutionaires shout, it’s more likely to be civil war than millennium.

O! Empty slogan! O! Hollow Révolution!

So, as I have indicated to Karine, who is lately shouting and revolutionating a lot, I do believe, as everywhere and in all times, most of what is supposed gold in all this is but cheap gilding, likely dangerously greenhouse-gas rich, too.

Forget the gilded promises, I tell the woman. Turn down the heat, snuggle up close, let’s take the bike, enjoy producing less CO2, playful-like.

In a time of strike, get a-pumping. Find some fun in it.

Révolution!

Evolve and inverse things ourselves, gather up the pearls rattling under the hooves of the swine, make that silk purse, fix up a lemonade… Etc., etc.

For instance, from our house, the Palais de Tokyo – the Musée de l’art moderne de la ville de Paris – is only 23 miles, there and back.

Lemonade!  

Tokyo’s time-stretched contemporary art exhibition Futur, ancien, fugitif, Une scène française is ongoing.

Futur, fugitif turns out to turn the usual on its head. Révolution! In a way.

Agreeable erotic willies flutter through the cramps as Karine and I stroll its acres.

Out of the passel of really fine work on show, the exhibition itself gets the big prize. I say this ‘though I think that every single esthetic worker in the Futur, ancien, fugitif show has bottom. So much so that I can even name particular favorites right off the top of my head as I sit here: Nina Childress, Jean-Luc Blanc, Anne Le Troter, Betrand Dezoteux…

… And I was deeply impressed with how Futur, fugitif’s artists have made their own the sense of the work of the “60s” made something fresh and unique from the soul of comic books, stuff and plastics… Futur, ancien, fugitif forces me to think, maybe for the first time in respect to contemporary art that there is a positive force of “tradition” that comes from experience rather than from special intention... This thought is only one of many possible thoughts Futur, ancien, fugitif gets you mulling over.

Anyhow, in the image of their soulful and sensitive choices, the curators of Futur, ancien, fugitif – a team including Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc Claire Moulène and Marilou Thiébault – put together a brilliant piece of conceptual, material and contextual contemporary art.

Caroline Mesquita: “Soft Evasion”, 2019: cardboard, paint. Photo: Aurélien Mole

Witness a unique début with Ruth Childs’ “fantasia” [by Tracy Danison]

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

When my boy was very little we would be walking along and he would suddenly stop dead, quivering like a pointer, point at this or that, cry “Behold”. Where he got “behold” from is a mystery. The this could be a dog with a torn ear, a pigeon with smeared rainbow in its wings, the that a gang of louts emptying a van, a woman pushing a stroller. Whatever it was, my boy was moved, really moved by it. So, we’d spend the next while looking silently and intently on, trying to penetrate the mystery of this dog’s ear, that pigeon wing or those louts, that woman.

He was apprehending, as the philosophers put it, the thing of itself. He was moved by the new feeling of – realization? wonder? enchantment? before the wide world. He was pointing that unique something that I look for when I say I am looking for beauty in art. In his “behold” he was a creator. Through him I could access the emotion of experiencing a thing new in the same way that I do when I confront of work of art.

The other day at the Atelier de Paris, Ruth Childs’ performance of her fantasia, a new creation, gave me a “Behold” moment, a chance to feel the emotion of witnessing something unique, made me a little boy apprehending the wide world.

This sounds exceptional, I know, but it’s what she somehow does. “Somehow” because Childs’ achievement is just not entirely explainable, though, whether it is set, light, sound, costume or gesture under scrutiny, everything in her performance is in place and (consequently?) in time. And I guess timing – in its kairos sense – developing then seizing the right moment, is what brings the spectator to the edge of witness. What makes her step over the edge to witness is in the “somehow”.

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

Childs’ fantasia performance re-informs Beethoven’s dramatic symphony and relights the felt-images of Disney’s gorgeous animation by situating revealing jets and swirls of educated, emotive and elegant movement between them. She catches the spectator up in alternate forms of both: as music and image, memory and moment, as image and music, moment and memory.

Total command of stage/choreography support the performance.  She begins stretched out in the right-hand angle of a visual triangle induced by a stack of primary-colored costumes front stage and a white heap bottom stage. The effect is to force the eye from her long, exposed thighs to her human center: to be with her as she moves and possesses the stage, possesses the music, possesses the spectators with the art of her senses.

So, centering on her center, mastering the art of set, pointing here to a crash of sound, there to a wave of color, Childs somehow enables unique witness.

To behold.

fantasia – Dance, Performance • November 2019 • Ruth Childs • Atelier de Paris, 12-13 November 2019• Α Ruth Childs has studied in the US and Europe and has been based in Geneva, working with choreographers such as Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Childs has been renewing the repertory of the well-known post-modern choreographer Lucinda Childs (e.g.,Calico Mingling, Katema, Reclining Rondo, Particular Reel), who is her aunt. With Stéphane Vécchione, Childs’ made her choreographical début in Paris in 2018 with The Goldfish & the Inner Tube as part of the Atelier’s annual June Events festival program. Ω Choreography: Ruth Childs / Performers: Ruth Childs / Lighting and technical management: Stéphane Vécchione / Outside choreographic consultant:  Nadia Lauro / Costuming: Cécile Delanoé / Production: SCARLETT’S, Tutu Production Ruth Childs calendar