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Santé, Bonheur! Joy! Imagination! Discernment! Thoughts on some upcoming dance and performance [By Tracy Danison]

Entanglement: Jann Gallois and Rafael Smadja perform Gallois’ “Compact”. Photo©Cie Burnout

Happy 2023. Best wishes. For this year, I propose taking it as it comes and, for what’s left, letting the heart decide.

This past New Year’s Eve I watched 18-year-old Ukraine refugee acrobat Sofia Kotetens gorgeously, meticulously tie herself in the emotional knots of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. It seemed to me that Kotetens asks rather than orders her body along for her acrobatic dances. I concluded that the process was: she seeks her body’s joy in being alive, finds it and gifts it to spectators. None of this challenging, overcoming herself stuff in Kotetens; it gets me down, this idea that the flesh is problematic.

Joy in the body was on my mind the other day, too, before the holidays, when I was getting ready for my contemporary dance class.

I had just got my codpiece and tutu in place when the notable choreographer and dance performer Jann Gallois blinked into the hallway I was using as my dressing room. The two pieces that made me a permanent fan of Gallois remain references for me: Compact and Diagnostic F20.9. The one is around body to body, the other, mind with body.

I asked Jann what she was up to? She told me, a piece around joy.

Later in the same afternoon, after class and after I had spent some time in front of a mirror feeling pretty good while assuming my inelegant fat back and handsome old-man’s man-tits, one of my dance-class mates invited me, along with my classmates to her house for the apéro.

“Nos Corps Vivants”, Arthur Perole. Photo©Festival Every Body

Once we all had drinks in hand, she raised her glass. Santé, Bonheur! she cried, clinking hers against her partner’s. Easy with a glance, this genial host managed to look each of us in the eye as she touched her glass against each one of ours in turn.

I thought: Santé. Bonheur. Health. Happiness. Full stop. Full stop. That about covers it, doesn’t it? No Happiness without Health, no Health without Happiness.

Which reminded me that no quark is un-entangled; when I look into the cat box, coincidence turns into synchronicity.

Jann Gallois’ joy, my dance class, my assumption of fat back and man-tits, my genial host’s “Health. Happiness.” and Sofia Kotetens’ pleasure are the media of my major choices for dance performance in this – what was formerly – deep winter.

I look in the box again and feel some strange attractors.

Choreographer François Gremaud is performing an analysis of Giselle and her wrongs – is she wronged or is a peasant dying from heartbreak an advance in consciousness? He and dance-performer Samantha van Wissen put their lamp up to the libretto of the famous ballet, one of the gothic-est stories  this side of the Castle of Otranto.

Gremaud and van Wissen have apparently cooked up a one-woman show with dance combo to do it. 

Within an even decade, this year is an odd number so I think it’s appropriate to complement classical gothic ballet analysis with future possible rituals.

Ritual and art use the sublime to link us here-below to us yonder. The performer choreographer-cum-freelance curator Agnes Gryczkowska has put together Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), a multi-creator, multi-craft exhibition modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual through ceremonies, gestures, objects and crafts linking “earth energy” and Life. Sounds like a study in the sacred. At Lafayette Anticipations from 15 February - 7 May 2023.

Man-tits? Why the “man”? Why not just “tits”? “My big tits”.

And why do I care? Why have I always cared?

Because the body is the theater of the mind. Festival Every Body, at Carreau du Temple between 17 and 21 February 2023 for its second edition, bills itself as a dance and performance focused on the “contemporary body” – the body’s place in society.

It’s that, sure, but, as dance performance rather than blah-blah, it’s more: an exercise in dance as imagination with introspection.  

In a world made up of cat boxes turning coincidence to synchronicity, what’s the truth and what’s the lie?

To help me with that, I’m going to see as much as I can of Festival Faits d’Hiver, from 16 January 2023 to 18 February 2023. The festival celebrates its 25^th season with a program built around and honoring the dancer and choreographer Thomas Lebrun. According to Christophe Martin, Faits d’Hiver’s main programmer, Lebrun represents par excellence the inventiveness with ability that represents the goals of the festival as an institution.

Martin runs the dance-performance organization Micadanses and is also the esthetic force behind it – Bien Fait! Micadanses’ end-of-residence dance-performance program, about which I’ve written recently, consistently puts out pieces that make sense – not always entertainment but always art (Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination).

When all is said and done, I’m looking forward to studying Martin’s discernment in the new creations on offer during the festival. I mean “discernment” more as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined it: not “taste” but as an ability to tell the difference between the “real” and the “fake”. And I mean “real” and “fake” as Lana Del Rey (National Anthem), defines them. I don’t think every performance on the bill will fit my expectations. I don’t think I won’t sometimes walk out baffled. But thanks to the discernment that goes into festival’s selections, I do think I’ll always come away with something more in my mind and spirit than I went in with.

Have you ever seen the goddess dance? Dorothée Munyaneza does Radouan Mriziga’s “Akal” [by Tracy Danison]

Dancer, singer, choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza. Photo © Maya Mihindou

Believe it or not, my critical skepticism evaporated when I saw the golden horns.

A second before, Akal’s mythology is contrary to fact, its suppositions stretched beyond belief.

Dorothée Munyaneza’s golden horns? Macbeth’s AK47.

A second after, the priestess of Neith is processesing to center stage.

Keats is absolutely right: beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

The form, shape, color, size of the horns is beautiful.

Beautiful, their weight and balance lends their truth to the professional experience of choreographer, singer, poet and dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza.

Munyaneza’s well-crafted steps and gestures point the geometry of the body and its mechanics, link them to the geometry of heaven and the dance of its movement. Her trained voice ripens in the thrill of words that seem to stand earth and heaven, bring us all into the presence of the sacred.

As we walk through the cold, feeling dreamy, we wondered how to fit Munyaneza’s invocation of the sacred into our dance experience.

Why was the beauty there? How did the truth come out?

Karine, my partner, tells me she thinks of Akal as a concert, a long arrangement of movement that transfixes you with sound and stories savory with bits of sense and vision. Munyaneza, it seems to her, repeats phrases of movement until the audience turns them to dance, reforms and redoes figures of sound – rustling, tinkling, words, verse, notes, periods – until you see the goddess in the hymn. Talking in the bus shelter, others agree with Karine.

But I see Akal as a concept – a by-the-rules Aristotle-type cathartic script captured by Mriziga’s choreography and Munyaneza’s collaborative execution.

The concept is then powered on the nests of complex memory in audience members. Or the sacred, the longing for a joining of heaven and earth, may be as universal as the need for catharsis, an archetype.

 

Dorothée Munyaneza, Akal, Atelier de Paris CDNC. Photo © Senda Jebali

As to Aristotle, archetypes and nests of memory and the truth in Akal: some years back, Karine and I were hiking. We ran into a young woman almost a girl squatting head-in-hands at the side of our path. She was dissociated, frightened but functional; we guessed she was going through a waxing psychosis, probably her first time. I know something about that, so we talked a little. She brightened, joined us walking until, around about nightfall, we came to our b&b.

The young woman chose to camp in a little stand of trees not far off. Early next morning, as we dressed, we saw her through our window, through the foggy dark, leaning against a tree. We asked her to share our breakfast.

Festival Signes d’Automne 2022 at the Belleville Swan # 2: Off-the-cuff creativity and new perspectives from Korea [by Tracy Danison]

Shadows and robots from “Homo Lupiens” by Kyung Shin Kim, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Timothée Shin

Off-the-cuff cooperative creativity and fresh consideration of the familiar was on show in every performance during studio Regard du Cygne’s two-day Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne with Festival S.O.U.M. this past Fall. S.O.U.M. is an international contemporary dance outfit with a mission to show off contemporary dance performance creations from Korea.

I was deeply impressed by the quality of the program’s cooperative work, but, especially, I was intrigued by the approaches to the show (choreography) and tell (intentions) parts of S.O.U.M.’s dance performance pieces. I had not given it much thought before the Regard du Cygne’s Soirée, but, since, at its most basic level, contemporary dance performance is about an individual experiencing movement, it’s going to show and tell especially about individual experience of culture and its perspectives.

And that’s what I felt each piece on the Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne program did: show and tell contemporary dance performance through the filter of experience of a culture that I do not know. Let me put it this way. When I first came to France, I kept bumping into familiar things and fumbling with familiar purposes because, while things look very much the same everywhere, measures are different. In high good humor and without the bruises, of course, my experience of the work of our friends from Korea, resembles that: I was reminded to keep adjusting for difference.

The first-day features were Couleurs and Want, both co-creations put together during a three-day residency at the Regard du Cygne.

Couleurs, by Sun-Hoo Yoo, a choreographer and dance performer from Korea and Marco Chenevrier, a dancer, actor and performer working between France and Italy, was a sort of high-culture “game show” that engages spectators and performers alike in interpreting movement and sound. Yoo told me that she and Chenvier built Couleurs into the frame of one of her existing choreographies.

Performed by visiting dancer Seisung Lee and Paris cellist Aurore Daniel, Want – which I noted down as a “musician-dancer interactional-orbit performance: an atom” – was, as far as I know, an original, put together during the Belleville residence. It was wild. I do like a punk cello. 

With audience members walking in the seating and on the edges of the stage and with active spectator and performer input required, as a performance, Couleurs was a risk. Yoo and Chenevier improvised choreographies for music that audience members chose as other audience members conspicuously interpreted their own feelings with colors on a whiteboard. The new-met artists went on to do performances that Yoo called, “Two soli in the shadow of one another and two duets in which we meet”.

Notably, despite their differences and short acquaintance, at no time did Yoo or Chenevier “step ahead” or “pull the partner along” or “step out” or “trail behind” inside their duo.

Elan with punk cello from “Want” by Seisung Lee and Aurore Daniel, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Johan Marimoutou

After the performance, I felt sure that Yoo and Chenevier shared a choreographic approach that owes a lot to circus and cabaret as well as to a taste for risk in search of authenticity. I also thought I understood that when Yoo says, “Two soli in the shadow of one another…”, she means something like “dancing where one of us is the shadow personality”, not “one of us in the background”. Also, when she says “… and two duets in which we meet”, she’s deliberately situating “duet” as “one dance from two dancing” rather than “a dance by two persons”. In other words, Yoo and Chenevier’s notable ability to stay in sync was not just professional courtesy but a parameter of their choreography (and maybe of Yoo’s framing choreography). They were not just “there with” each other (with a margin for the personal expression of each), but were “there with because (the other is also there)”. Synchronicity, not synchronousness.  

I felt cabaret, circus, risk and, especially, the will to synchronicity in Want, too.

Want’s program notes say, “[Seisung Lee and Aurore Daniel] found [and then pursued and realized] a common thirst to allow their feelings and sensitivities to escape into the exterior world through their movement and sound”.

They did, too, by getting into breathless showman mode even as they pursued the intensely personal effort to fire up between them a synergy of body, instruments, movement and sound in person-to-person engagement. Seisung Lee danced into Aurore Daniel’s musician space (seeking out not just the music but also the person producing it). Daniel, her cello quivering and panting, opens out into Lee’s dance space (inhabiting not just Lee’s dance but also his élan).

On the second day, for the program’s made-in-Korea performances, beyond the showmanship and the search for synchronicity I also found in the co-creations, there seemed to me to be differently-framed perspectives or unexpected conclusions from the same information, different ways of using things, along with casual innovation in performance usages.

Drawing energy from a new universe in “Elegant Universe” by Sun-Hoo Yoo, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Timothée Shin

For instance, Kyung Shin Kim’s Homo Lupiens (“anagram man”), uses ambiguous human-machine costuming and “robot gestural” to ask about the “Homo Meta” scrambled into the Homo Faber that is currently struggling to re-imagine Homo Sapiens… Could it be that Homo Sapiens are the damned robots they seem to want very much to create?

Instead of the elaborate makeup and grimacing of the clown figure I am used to, Histoire d’un Clown by Jae-Heon Choi and Ji Min Lee with the Mousai Dance Company, hide behind those porcelain-looking fixed-face masks I associate with Japanese theater. They do a clown act that is half vaudeville, half stand up …

Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw smoothly mixes hip hop and contemporary phrases inside what looks to me like a “battle format”: damned interesting. With a four-person team, Ku evokes present “see” & past “saw” and, as he writes, “Through dance, two complementary actions alternate to move them forward, out of view. A touch touches…I aim to create links.”. Which all sounds to me like somebody trying to add serious torque to my way of thinking about “ying & yang”…

And so it went through the whole S.O.U.M. program: new takes on familiar things, new takes on new things and unfamiliar familiarities, whether Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw or Marco Chenevier’s solo Bach sonate
e danzate, where hedances “either a physical concert or a sound choreography” or … Sun-Hoo Yoo’s Elegant Universe solo.

In Elegant Universe, Yoo’s active and sensual dance flowers before a single straight-backed musician (or philosopher of sound), formal in what I suppose is a “traditional” gown, who makes …  “sounds to consider by”: drawn-out notes from a – I suppose to be a “traditional” – hand-drum, gong-bell and paper-rustler. Yoo says of this dance performance, “We empty ourselves and draw energy from a new universe in order to pass on its hope and beauty to Earth.” And it was that, I felt that, and more; it finished by getting a gay laugh from me.

So, this France-Korea co-creativity sphere in Belleville turns out to be a good idea and an enlightening one. I hope Regard du Cygne plays host again next year (and the year after that).

In the meantime, put S.O.U.M. on your bucket list. It may be coming to a dance venue near you.

Festival Signes d’Automne 2022 at the Belleville Swan # 1: a right approach, time and place for contemporary dance [by Tracy Danison]

“Wel come” by Joachim Maudet with Pauline Bigot and Sophie Lèbre, cie Les Vagues, produced for “Festival Signes d’Automne” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

I ended the 2022 edition of the Signes d’Automne program at studio Regard du Cygne with a performance called Wel come by Joachim Maudet. On the corner of rues de Belleville and Pixerécourt in Paris’ Belleville neighborhood, “Regard of the Swan” has been hosting contemporary dance and performance since the 1980s. It continues the mission with brio.

Maudet’s work as a choreographer and performer is a good example of the little studio’s promotion of (I think so anyway) an Isadora Duncan-inspired “creative dance performance for all” agenda. Wel come succeeds a mix of slow and no movement and ventriloquism with a just-right spice of light, sound and space. In short, the work impresses with a thoughtful and respectful grasp of ordinary human perception and its choreographic uses; gets spectators musing and laughing.

In addition to Maudet’s creation, this year’s Signes d’Automne included two days of a “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne”, an encore of Générations by Fabrice Ramalingom (a piece featured in The Best American Poetry this past spring), and a legacy retrieval in Julie Dubois’s l’Isa\dora Duncan, in which Dubois dances from her personal trove of (Isadora’s adopted daughter) Lisa Duncan’s work.

On the menu as well were the recurring adult and kid versions of “Spectacles Sauvages” – presentations of new creations or of productions new to Paris. This year, a last minute call gave three creditable new creations and one truly astonishing stand-up performance piece: Mécanique de l’invisible, by Gaëlle Gillieron; Parasite et bottes-de-plume, a very physical duo of … What? … “Behavioral typology”,  by performers Simon Peretti and Marius Bathaux; and Débordement, a choreography-music creation with Delphine Jungman and Aston Bonaparte performing with original music by Patrick Biyik. As a finale, En pièce jointe, a performance tour de force by Armande Sanseverino and Gaël Germain which brilliantly shows how things go when the digital stream stutters. To cap things off were events such as the conversations among dancers and spectators hosted by dancing philosopher Karima El Amrani and the Regard’s perennial “Family Day”, this time featuring Le Lapin et la Reine (“The Queen & the Rabbit”) in (French) Sign, hosted by dancer and choreographer Nina Vallon.

“En pièce jointe” by Armande Sanseverino and Gaël Germain, produced for “Spectacles Sauvages”, Signes d'Automne 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

There’s a lot to say about each one of these varied performances, initiatives and events, but for my money, Fall 2022’s top bill goes to the two-day “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne”. Festival S.O.U.M. is a (South) Korean contemporary dance outfit. The Soirée turned on mixing movement artists from Korea and locals in short co-creative residences and producing the results on the first evening – the artists had no previous experience of one another – and following on the next day with pieces from the repertoires of the visitors. It was a decided audience and an esthetic success.

Both a distant image of dance performance innovation and an echo of Regard’s dance-performance-for-all mission, the two-day Soirée held up a made-in-Korea mirror to a lot of what the studio tries to achieve on its own turf.

A general hunger for new stuff aside, people from the Europe culture sphere seem open to cultural production with a perspective from Korea – witness the film Parasite or the TV series Squid Game. Why not contemporary live-performance?

Like Taiwan, another place rooted in a strong and vibrant traditional culture that’s managed to transition into a liberal society, Korea’s seems a happening place for global contemporary culture. Unlike contemporary work from Taiwan, before Regard du Cygne’s program, the only live performance from Korea I have been able to get to know is the Zumba version of Gangnam Style – and I did that all on my own.  I think my situation in respect to live performance culture from Korea, let alone contemporary dance from Korea is pretty typical. So, good job for my culture, Regard programmers.

“Couleurs” by Sun-Hoo Yoo, Marco Chenevier produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

Whether in co-creation with locals or previously developed work, lovely and intriguing splashes of unfamiliar culture graced S.O.U.M.-inspired performance. But contemporary Dance, capital D, was clearly what was happening for everybody, performers, choreographers and spectators alike. S.O.U.M. choreographers and performers are full owners of a “global” art of contemporary dance, which like break dance, or hip-hop, is a world dance mode, by definition exotic for nobody and open to all.

As I say, Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne was an initiative with the right approach at the right time. Regard du Cygne was the right place to do it.

Regard is one of the last dance places, maybe the last independent contemporary dance place, in Paris intramuros where you can still see heretofore “untested” talent and movement art creativity. But the studio’s all-woman management and staff are not just prepared to look at and even take a chance on what an untested creator has got up to, the venue is optimized for the task. Taken materially and morally, Regard du Cygne creates the sense of “being-there-with”, the key, for me, to appreciating, especially, new, untested work.

Regard du Cygne is a materialization of an intimate setting.

Its railroad-flat style ticketing, reception, kitchen and bar area, along with a well-apportioned performance space of polished parquet, bare stone and ancient beams are better than functional. Seating on good Lego-block-like bleachers is perfectly adequate to the usual slightly-less-than hour-long dance performance, is flexible and wastes no space; light, sound, visuals and acoustics are as good as any.

An interior door at the top of the performance space leads into a building that serves as a back-stage and as dressing and stock rooms. Most important, perhaps, the building serves as the upper wall to the central cobblestone courtyard. The courtyard overflows with green, mostly flowering, plants; furnished with some camp tables, chairs and a bench, it’s a natural meeting space for spectators and creators alike.

Intimate, professional, unique, with deep roots in Paris’ contemporary dance performance scene, Regard du Cygne was the perfect venue for a debut of contemporary dance-performance from Korea.

I hope it becomes a permanent anchor point for Festival S.O.U.M.

From theater to performance: “Waiting for Godot” in Ivana Muller’s “Slowly, slowly … Until the sun comes up” [by Tracy Danison]

*Peter Woodthorpe asked Beckett one day what “Waiting for Godot” was really about: 'It's all symbiosis, Peter, it's symbiosis,' he said. Woodthorpe played Estragon in the first British production. - Wikipedia. Photo © Atelier de Paris

When I was a student in the mid-70s, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was to modern theater what Macbeth was to modern tragedy. How did the Vôlkischer Beobachter headline the Warsaw Uprising? That’s it, Godot was “A Reminder & a Symbol!”.

Or so it seemed to me.

At the very least, a fellow felt obliged to at least recognize references to merit a place at the department cocktail.

In fact, at some point in the late 60s, I’d been precociously corrupted by my late brother, Peter, already a student. We shared a taste for literature and vast distrust of those set above us.

Peter had introduced me to Godot up on our old Victorian-style house’ widow’s walk. We used in those days to sometimes hoist ourselves up there to smoke cigarettes. Good view and absolutely safe from fretful busybodies.

At the time, I was swatting away to make a “cloud chamber” – promoted by my Dad’s Scientific American as an easy way to prove in your own home that atomic particles do exist. From there, I expect I hoped to show that Jesus was just an undisgested bit of beef and that sex was just fine.

Peter was learning Godot for English and brought the playbook up there with us.

I had a cursory look and, for commentary, made a rude noise.

But Peter said, not for the first time, something like, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ stood up, straightened himself and read a few lines while galooting (carefully!) on that narrow patch of lead, tin and slate of a perch. From further talk and his intensely sincere galoots, I managed to understand that, in his opinion, Godot wasn’t about what was or wasn’t said so much as howthe performers were in saying it. Also it was a really good play.

When I later saw Godot on stage, as my brother predicted, I did get carried away by the shuffles, glances, pauses, postures and bits of chat. And it was a really good play for that not for whatever flakey story it was telling.

This walk down lit-crit memory lane is owing to thoughts following on Ivana Müller’s performance-theater piece, Slowly, slowly… Until the sun comes up. Also involved: Atelier de Paris, a chat with a fellow spectator, a few hurried words with Müller herself and a pretty long bike ride through woods and town at night.

I went to see Slowly, slowly…  without many expectations; I avoid reading the notes before a performance. The only work I had seen from Müller, as far as I can recall, is Hors-Champ (Off-field), an in situ performance, part of Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 dance-performance program.

Before going into Slowly, Slowly… space, spectators must, at a minimum, get rid of their socks and shoes and put on clean socks. This done, they enter the space: long benches set in a square around a large performance space. Swathes of beige or grey cloth fabric cover spectator benches and performance space alike.

Just as in life, Ivana Müller’s “Slowly, Slowly… Until the Sun Comes Up”, ends when the performers roll up the bedclothes. Photo © Atelier de Paris

Taking my place, I had the impression of leaning over a sunken space… like a wrestling or orchestra pit.

A variously zippered full-cover tarp let Slowly, Slowly’s three performers – two men and a woman – pull out and use long strips of different-colored material for activities in the course of the performance.

The piece ends when the performers roll up the tarp.

Three minutes of dialogue into Slowly, Slowly and Waiting for Godot popped into my head. While performers try to smooth out wrinkles or straighten or dress up in the fabrics nearest them or pulled out from under the tarp, Slowly, Slowly’s dialogue turns mostly around performers’ dream monologues. The monologues, and short commentaries related to them, are allusive and evasive, crafted to avoid conclusions. Performer verbal and physical interactions point toward patterns and place and then, since there are no theres there to worry over, simply change the subject, vary words and syntax and indirection a little.

Three minutes after realizing this, it occurred to me that Ivana Müller’s performance space had re-created in my mind the “sleep and rassle pit” – you could sleep there any old way you wanted ­– my folks put into the family’s summer cottage. And because it puts physical place in the place of story place – no street corners, no chance meetings, no slaves, no masters: no literary clichés, no ongoing other stories to pursue (WTF? A sleep-rassle pit? What’s that mean? What story’s that from?) – that’s all very different from Godot.

And 10 minutes after I realized this … I was completely carried away by the shuffles, busywork, glances, pauses and postures and savoring the bits of pointless content in the chat. Chat that felt much more like my son’s text messages than Estragon and Vladimir’s cracker-barrel philosophizing. And all in the comfortable framework of a private memory, evoked by Müller’s psycho-socially- informed, as opposed to literary-politically-informed, stagecraft.

Once the performance was over, the person sat next to me, a performance scenarist as it turned out, took the performance completely in stride, volunteering among other sharp observation and praise, that she also sloughed into memories of sleep-overs: an experience of positive feeling, a sense of moments of friendship and intimacy.

When I told Ivana Müller that I’d been struck by the Waiting-for-Godot in her Slowly, Slowly…, she told me she was unfamiliar with Beckett’s play.

I believe Müller.

My brother, though dead, was wholly right to look at Godot as about being how, rather than saying what. Then contemporary and later critics, along with Becket himself, on the other hand, thinking that the piece was about how to say what, were only almost right.

It is the greatest modern play but that is because it resembles theater so little and contemporary performance so much. It’s a transition piece.

Beckett struggled to get where he goes and struggled even more to understand where he’d got to.*

Seventy years after Godot – and still without a critical framework for un-narrative to account for it!  – Ivana Müller just doesn’t need to think too much about shaping movement, place and sound to make “performance-dance” that gets beyond words.

Have I mentioned that Slowly, Slowly … Until the sun comes up, as well as Samuel Beckett’s number, has that special piquant that makes good performance?  Put Ivana Muller’s Slowly, slowly … Until the sun comes up on your bucket list and you won’t go wrong.

… and Débussy, too: Josephine Tilloy, Thi Mai Nguyen, Lisbeth Gruwez & Claire Chevallier

“Prémisse”, Thi Mai Nguyen. The Princess soliloquizes the “commemoratio dilemma”. A man of infinite jest. Photo © Danny Willems

Etoile du nord and Théatre de la Bastille recently gifted me a little trinity of dance jewels: Josephine Tilloy’s Evila and Thi Mai Nguyen’s Prémisse at Etoile and Lisbeth Gruwez who danced pianist Claire Chevallier’s Débussy’s Piano Works at Bastille.

Keep them all in mind.

Evila and Prémisse were part of Festival ZOA, Zone d’occupation artistique, a woman-centered production effort that is new to me and, at view, full of promise.

Because politics or culture issues tend to come down to positions, they don’t usually work for me as themes in movement art. I say this as a person who supported Bill Clinton’s position on criminal justice and now wonders every night how much of that cop’s weight on George Floyd’s neck was mine.

Anyhow, as poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin noted: “Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone!”. It’s is life experience plus imagination what does that. Movement art is the art of experience plus imagination. So movement art can’t really get across unrealized “positions” or “points-of-view”.

With well-thought out visual choreography and physical talent, Evila and Prémisse manage get to get well beyond positions and points of view to experience shared with spectators and a broad space for imagination. With the same result, like a magician who bears a flame in the palm of her hand, Lisbeth Gruwez manages to turn an interpretation of Débussy’s Piano Works into a moment where personality, material, movement and sound are music.

Josephine Tilloy’s Evila works on the plan of Wildman Fischer’s Merry go round (1968): once you realize that the up and down is intimately linked to the round and round, in the head a light comes on. Tilloy puts onto a carrousel and in harness and swimsuits the three delicate be-tutu-ed dancers who usually go up and down under glass with the minutes and hours on the mantelpiece. The carrousel turns and turns and these objects – they are objects! –  of housewifely charm churn to objects of sexual fascination, females, pole dancers, orderless cluster-fuckers… If I’ve got rollout, scenario and imagination all undone and mixed up, blame the transparency of the choreography. Also its effect: an existential nausée in the sense Sartre meant it – This here here is a construct.

Considering the affinity men and women generally feel for each other, the deliberate, enforced inequality of women and men puzzles me. Apart from forcing humanity into the roles freed-man overseers, camp guards, prisoners and, as Christine & The Queens put it, “Half-ladies”, inequality strangles love.

I think Thi Mai Nguyen’s pointing the baffled affinity from first to last explains a large part of my strong feeling for Prémisse (“Beginning”). The show notes of begin with “Kali est sans limites, s‘éclatant sur la piste de danse. Une main d‘homme la prend, elle le fait danser.” It is a really lovely solo dance performed with (an seeming preternaturally) beautiful body to a choreography that’s meant, I think, as narrative mime.
What I saw on stage was woman discovering desire, then its traps: dress, nakedness, affinity, dance, love … not a relationship… a situation she must, can’t, doesn’t want to, escape. Instead of sleep, she discovers blood and a bodiless male head in her bed … She must compose herself with that… situation, too… turns the dead head on its head, births it, turns the man into her baby, herself from object of love to giver of love – very psychoanalytic. But the long and short of it is that Thi Mai Nguyen’s dance makes a myth for today’s Kali  – paints a dilemma and its impossibilities that grabs the spectator by the throat. Good stuff.

As to Débussy’s Piano Works and its magician.

Gruwez’s “solo” is actually a quartet of pianist Claire Chevallier in play, Débussy’s music, the personality of Chevallier’s Erard pianoforte and the dance between Gruwez herself and Chevallier-the-pianist-at-play.

It’s been a while – and between pandemic, Putin’s war and the rising tempo of climate catastrophes, what a while it’s been! – so I can’t say if Dancing Bob Dylan was the last time I saw Lisbeth Gruwez perform or if it’s just the particular pleasure at the memory that makes me think so. However it may be, the magic she uses for Claire Débussy’s Piano Works is very similar to and has very much the same result as Dylan.

Gruwez has a choreographical sense grown out of what I think of her “casually precise” intensity. I’ve watched her off-stage in a crowd. She’s John Keats’ Empathy, smoking cigarette after cigarette, La Part de l’Autre moving within and away from friends, fans and strangers alike. Her intensity, I think, is made from an uncanny awareness of both what is on her plate and just how it gets eaten: awareness of the qualities of the space around, awareness of the presences of its human and not-human inhabitants, of phenomena happening, awareness of her own proprioceptive processes. It’s this casually precise intensity that makes me remember her dancing Dylan: a process of going from understanding the great poet, dancing his rhythm, seeing his images, to caressing the moment of making.

In Piano Works – Débussy, Gruwez uses her casual precision to show – as a magician shows a miraculous flame burning in the palm of her hand –  pianist Clair Chevallier within the complex of relations of people, things and sounds that shape into “music”.

For my money, in Piano Works, it’s opening the piece by “unsexing” herself and Claire Chevallier that works the initiating spell of the performance. Casually undoing an expectation about the duet, unsexing unlocks other energies: the same effect as Lady Macbeth’s invocation. Other energies make it easy to believe what you want to see, makes seem be.

Other energy enables dramatic tension, which, gives Gruwez the chance to casually and precisely distance herself from her interpretative role to give the performance its autonomy. Gruwez, who has strong natural equilibrium mixed with years of body training, wears a set of tippy-slippy deck shoes to falsify that. As well as the visual dissonance, the resulting slight physical tension has her say to onlookers, “I’m not interpreting Débussy, see. I incidentally heard a snippet of Preludes (or something!) from a window by chance open to the rain – makes me wiggle a little. I’m out for fags, actually”. In other words, forget the magician, look to the palm: there’s Chevallier’s straight back, concentration, her attention, her regard, herself, her bench, her limber fingers listening, hands like bobbins weaving the discerning sound of that ancient, enormous, looming piano. Piano Works – Débussy is itself. The moment you see is its music.

Whether she’s made of sugar and spice and intensity casual and precise, as I’ve suggested, or something even finer, Lisbeth Gruwez is a performer to see.  Be sure to look on her troupe’s site if you’re out exploring in France – you might catch her in one of those surprising local culture spaces. 

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

Loîc Touzé’s "No Oco". Photo © Laurent Philippe

There’s a lot of contrast – in chronology, in genre, in philosophy – in Ballet de Lorraine’s 2022-23 season. I expect that’s why it has opened with Loîc Touzé’s No Oco  (Portuguese for “Not empty”) and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot. Though the choice of Le Pladec, born in 1976, and Touzé, apparently not born on any particular date in any particular year, is played by the ballet communicators as generational, the contrast goes to what dance does and how the choreographer gets to it.

Loîc Touzé and Maud Le Pladec are and were both top-line dancers. Le Pladec has danced for Touzé choreographer among many other of today’s frequently billed dance folk. Touzé danced for the Paris Opéra from an early age before getting out of classic dance and into real work. The shared starting point is important because the one and the other choreographer have the dancer’s attitude that dance is enough. Dance is a natural phenomenon. The spectator will naturally follow if the dancer dances right, according to the wordless but universal alphabet.

Touzé’s dance appeals to my un-worded sentiments. I’ve had a faible for Touzé since I saw, in quick succession, his Form simple, a dance through the Goldberg variations and Je suis lent,”I’m slow”, Touzé’s Conférence dansée (“Danced Talk”) on his life in dance.

In Goldberg, Touzé manages to locate the sheer deliciousness of Bach’s freed-up creative flow by invoking the sounds and movements of his (Bach’s) time. Je suis lent is like contemplating one of my own possible lives. In both, the choreography turns dance movement so personal that it becomes an invitation to share the moment, if not the skin, of the performer. In both these creations and others, music is danced over. It is not a background but a tool for adjusting how movement is understood.

The same intimacy-producing approach is at work in Ballet de Lorraine’s version of Touzé’s No Oco. From a stage cut in half by a long and broad bench (like a frontier), performers casually experiment a ceaseless and unstoppable flow of relationships over musics recalling different rhythms of life … It just seems to happen…

Like a lot of things here-below, No Oco ends in a rather haunting a capella.

Maud Le Pladec’s dance appeals to my un-worded feelings.

Maud Le Pladec's "Static Shot". Photo © Laurent Philippe

In contrast to Touzé, Le Pladec is, as her presentation video, Créations 2009-19, tends to show, for performers and spectators alike, mostly exhilarating. Where Touzé uses music to gentle spectators into attention to performer movement, Le Pladec uses it to thrust her performers and, with them, spectators, into a physical and visual kaleidoscope of thrusting arms, stomping feet and untamed hearts: feeling, not sentiment.

When she’s obliged to put on heels, Karine sometimes will parade around the room pumping her butt and crying ironically, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” Essentially, that’s what Static Shot does: parades around shouting “Fuck for peace! Fuck for love! Fuck for fun!”. Except it’s no joke. Performer and spectator share a shot of pure energy – the eroticism is an incantation, not the thing itself.

Static Shot, as close as you can get to a hip-hop chorus-line march with majorettes without actually being a hip-hop chorus-line march with majorettes, flows pure energy (through music) into the natural sensuality of fit, willing bodies and envelops spectators in an attentive fugue.

Static shot is good stuff. Also it reminds audiences that contemporary dance is earth and air, that it handles feeling andsentiments certainly as well as break and ballet. Better, maybe, because freer.

Put Maud Le Pladec and Loïc Touzé on your bucket list.

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #1: the easy confidence of lovers [by Tracy Danison]

 

View of Stanislas Square from the Opéra National de Lorraine. Architecture, culture, venue, the city of Nancy’s a little jewel of a big provincial town and a good place to be. Photo Patrick Maheul

A few hours watching Ballet de Lorraine interpret Loîc Touzé and Maud Le Pladec in Nancy’s opera is luxury – quality art, choreography, culture, lovely venue, a little jewel of a big provincial town with nice shops and restaurants, friendly people.

The neat and spacious neoclassical-cum-art deco city is a good place to be.

If Nancy opera director Petter Jacobsson and his crew are working with the tourist board to bring weekenders to the city, they’re doing a job that merits twice whatever the contract might say. But, in a wobbly-minded act of panicky post-Covid foot-shooting, I am sorry to say, the regional authorities have just cut Jacobsson’s already-strained budget by 10% across the board.

There’s no other ballet company with quite the group vibe of the Ballet de Lorraine. They radiate the easy confidence of lovers. Whether at their home in Nancy or on tour, I come away from a Ballet de Lorraine performance feeling as if I’ve made acquaintance – acquaintance with somebody else’s sense of the world.

I think this sense is down to the company’s diversity. Not so much a diversity of morphologies, postures, ethnicities. That’s just a mirror of France today. More important, “diversity” seems for them an expression of the right to be who one is on stage: an individual person, a distinct person, even in a group of individuals.

"No Oco", Loïc Touzé. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Their performance style certainly gives the person space.

The company doesn’t seem to work so much to a standard as within parameters: through a mix of individual interpretations and a will to fuse talents, they seem to work towards a cumulative act of imagination rather than to an ideal enforced by instruction and correction. The result is that I find myself less admiring the execution of a phrase than waiting for what comes next. As a narrative of movement, they are more thriller than romance.

There is something of the high-wire acrobat ethic in the Ballet de Lorraine: in the end, good performance, group confidence and staying whole amount to the same thing. I am thinking especially of Machine de Cirque, the Québec troupe whose approach ensures that “mistakes” come out as exciting “variations” on their flow of titillating antics, at least for the audience.

"Static Shot", Maid Le Pladec. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Click to get a taste of Ballet de Lorraine’s “perfection in execution” through time and mix of choreographies.

Ballet de Lorraine’s 2022-23 season has opened with program 1 featuring Loîc Touzé’s No Oco  (Portuguese for “Not empty”) and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot.

Both pieces have in part at least been created as part of the opera’s celebration of the community of creators, performers, artisans and citizens that make it up and carry it forward. Program 2, in April 2023, also feature new creations, Rarity, by Adam Linder and Dancefloor, by Michèle Murray. Program 3, in May and June 2023, will do a mix of modern dance legend, commemoration, remix, contemporary, invited repertory and classy hip-hop – Sounddance, For Four Walls, Air Condition, Un Boléro, Cela nous concerne tous (“This concerns everybody”) and Earthbound. I am looking especially forward to Un Boléro, choreography by Dominique Brun and François Chaignaud, noting that Chaignaud’s Souflette got me appreciating old-style camp. Also, he’s always wild, or tries to be.

Ballet de Lorraine (and its host city) are worth a train ride.

Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor. 

Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor. 

 

Selling on the edge, g’bye hoopla and two contributions: Rituel N°5, Françoise Dupuy, Laura Sheleen & Elizabeth Regina [by Tracy Danison]

The humus fanatic has it right. Once dead, our contribution evolves. Photo © Romy Alizé

Rituel N°5: La Mort by Émilie Rousset and Louise Hémon produced at the Atelier de Paris earlier this month drolely and elegantly highlights how commercial culture manages to spew up a honey-mouthed and optimistic “business of death”. It has a wonderful cast, too – Barbara Chanut, Mohamed El Mazzouji, Anaïs Gournay, Manon Hugny, Damoh Ikheteah, Tom Pezier, Arthur Rémi, Ophélie Ségala. Together, they deftly negotiate esthetic and useful multimedia into a quick stand-up theatrical style. Special kudos to a pale blonde enthusiast for humus-processing corpses (Manon Hugny) and to tubby-tummy Kevin’s pre-sales “aperitifs of death” (delivered by Tom Pezier).

Rituel 5 reminded me that a lot of well-known figures, with more or less laboriously managed hoopla, have lately been shuffling off the mortal coil.

I’m particularly thinking here of the late Queen Elizabeth II, celebrated for discretely holding her nose and dispensing charity with cypher-like poise! All for nearly three-quarters of a century! Duty, it’s called. The woman’s remains enjoyed a seemingly infinite state-subsidized swan song: “Je meurrss, je meurrrrssss, je meurrrrrrrrssssss”. Cats! Or, rather, Corgis!

It’s a shame that funerals like the defunct British queen’s suck up so much otherwise obviously available social oxygen, leaving us all that much more stupid.

The distraction of the famous funeral makes it hard to remember that the dead do contribute more than fat fees for thepompes funèbres and the lawyers. That’s because, in a certain way, Rituel N° 5’s pale-haired humus-fanatic has it right. The dead are destined for the humus bin. That is, once dead, our contribution is freed up to evolve autonomously.

Settling back on my blood-red Recamier, turning my eyes skyward, I descry three types of dead: empty dead, personal dead and spiral or Fibonacci dead.

If the UK’s late queen has symbolized poised nose-holding these many years, dead, she’s as empty as Wednesday evening’s rubbish barrel. Dead, public projections seek more lively targets, such as her boy, Charles; although a very expensive one, absent the symbol, her husk, royal as may be, is a husk and she’s got a place among the empty dead.

The personal dead are just the opposite of the empty dead, who have been, essentially, public receptacles. The personal dead affect the matters around which one arranges one’s own life – I think of the personal dead as adding an un-calculable heft to a person’s skipping stone just at it smacks the water. Or as an analogy of entanglement, the phenomenon that lets two separate things be in the same place at the same time and very evidently different.

Among the recent personal dead, Françoise Dupuy, 97 years old, checked out in mid-September. She was, along with her husband, the still-living Dominique, teacher to and choreographer for many of France’s now-senior and influential choreographers and dancers. She’s buried in Père Lachaise, where all mourners slip into the lost funeral scene from Les 400 Coups for a time. Dupuy believed, I have been told, that dance exists to let a body be authentically themself.

A couple of months back I had the pleasure to interview Laurence Bertagnol about her open-to-all-comers “research” dance group. Laurence now runs the dance and music program at Conservatoire de danse et de musique Erik Satie Bagnolet, the place where Jaque Charaund developed France’s contemporary dance scene with his Ballets pour demain and Concours de Bagnolet. Françoise Dupuy taught Laurence Bertagnol to dance.

When Laurence and I met again at the opening of the Regard du Cygne’s Journée de Matrimoine celebration, her mouth twisted in a mild consternation, Laurence told me she was feeling Dupuy’s death. She explained that, although she had broken with her many years ago, Dupuy was her “other mother”, her “dance mother”. With a sigh as soft as a cat’s laugh, Laurence adds that she had always been fearful lest Dupuy and her birth mother should meet… She broke with Dupuy, because, she says, “I wanted to dance like me.”

In the way the “arms” of a galaxy define it as a galaxy distinct from a spray of stars, the spiral or Fibonacci dead link the vastly different into vast units. That’s why shapes and things in the universe describe as forms of infinite spirals or Fibonacci series.

I learned about this while – or, perhaps, because – my late brother and I were munching celery stalks in the kitchen at my folks’ one night. As I now know, certain dead among us also descry as spirals or Fibonacci series.

Just the day before getting the news about Françoise Dupuy from Laurence Bertagnol, I was also at the Regard du Cygne, to attend an homage to Laura Sheleen, of whom I had never heard. Laura Sheleen died not forgotten in 2021 under Covid lockdown in a far-suburban Ehpad –établissement d'hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – a public old folks home.

I supposed that, like Françoise Dupuy, Laura Sheleen, who came to France after dancing with Martha Graham, was a teacher and choreographer, one of the personal dead for the pretty large crowd of people participating in the homage.

She is that, surely, for life-witnesses such as, among others who danced and explored the world of the mind with Sheleen, Amy Swanson, founder and recently-retired director of the Regard du Cygne or Viviane Thibaudier, a Jungian psychoanalyst or Anna Alexandre, a specialist in theater therapies and behavior psychology or, again, Jabrane Sebnat, a sufi dancer and a psychotherapist.

But, as I began to listen and then to read through the little front-back photocopied program, I realize that Sheleen was one of the spiral dead, one of those whose contribution describes the shapes of the world: a powerful advocate of and innovator in understanding the function of dance chez nous. Through dance, Sheleen worked with myth, masks, movement and space on the problem of individuation. Not forgetting Eve Alexandre’s excellent short films on the application and effect of Sheleen’s approach(es), professional-witnesses for her contribution were enthusiastic working psychiatrists, behavior, dance and theater therapists …

According to a German architect anthropologist who happened to be sitting next to me, Sheleen is especially known for her work on the role of space in “proprioception” – knowing where you are.

In an act of illuminating synchronicity, the remarkable choreographer and dancer Yasmine Hugonnet clarified this idea the next day in her new performance, La Peau de L’Espace (“The Skin of Space”), premiered at Lafayette Anticipations, 16 September. Hugonnet says, if I understand her, that proprioception is a feedback loop rather than a plug-in: you need space around to know where your body is but your perception creates and recreates that space. You can’t get it going by plugging in a model. In the same way that a water pump has to be primed with water, proprioception takes priming with movement, gesture and place. Sheleen’s contribution helps people on the autism spectrum or with behavior difficulties or psychoses find a better space in the world.

Happy trails all.

Breaking, ballrooming, tumbling, poésie: is dance sport? [by Tracy Danison]

Daily life is getting back to… dance… sport … art ... life. Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

October already!

Daily life has definitely been regaining substance.

Neighbor photographer Sarah Meunier has turned her lens back to life in public, especially to our newer, neighbors.

From the bright and shiny evidence, some of these youngest sweetest neighbors, at least, must have only just learned their break, just when it became an Olympic sport.

But break stays dance, right? Just like ballroom dancing – “dancesport”?

Dance as sport. How can that happen?

Though I’m sure tourist-board marketing geniuses have been toying with the pairing since France got the 2024 games, I only touched on the topic just before the Covid lockdowns, with Christina Towle, the programmer at Regard du Cygne. At the time, Christina was putting together her Bounce Back, a choreography for four that mixes contemporary dance, basketball and electronic music.

I went back to Christina, who is now working on a new sport-dance choreography around the 400-meter relay tentatively titled Près feu (“Ready, set”), and asked about the relationship of sport with dance. She was fairly definitive.

Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Sport is strictly-coded choreography, she says, adding that movement analysis bears her out on the choreography part of the equation. The strict coding - there are moves you always must and always must not do in sequence to achieve certain results - which generally allows scoring by points, also sets sport apart.

There are athletes that use the strict coding to go beyond “sport” and become dancers. Christina cites Muhammad Ali, reminding me that the greatest boxer of all time described his boxing method as “float(ing) like a butterfly, stinging like a bee”, and consistently referred to himself as a dancer. The video evidence and my own memory suggest Christine isn’t wrong.

Christina’s experiments in bringing out the dance in sport apart, for me, anyway, the theme of “sport” + “dance” has been floating around only since late Spring, when Carreau du Temple hosted a Festival Jogging. Part of the city’s “Formes Olympiques” program to drum up interest in the 2024 games, Jogging, which picked up again as Atelier de Paris’“Dansez sport!” in early September, featured quality choreographers and performance such as Valeria Giuga & Anne-James Chaton’s Coaching, Marine Colard’s Le Tir Sacré and Alban Richard’s Vivace.

Roughly, but close enough, Coaching and Le Tir Sacré treat shared sport-dance themes of unity of body and mind, elegance & perfection, as well as surrounding language or rhetoric. Alban Richard’s Vivace sews an incredible variety of dance intentions and styles into a vivacious 35-minute relay race.

“Dansez sport!” had a family-oriented pedagogical complement, highlighting in-practice links between sport and dance, offering, among many other beguiling workshops, a “Krumpfest back to school de Wrestler Danse”, complete with battle. Krump is a particularly expressive form of break dance: very apt to make one think about the sense and sensibilities of its performers. Also on offer: classes on break-dance footwork, table tennis, roller and blade skating and sports commentary. 2024 Olympic visitors might do well to look at dance activities at Carreau du Temple and Atelier de Paris, as well as other dance-venues, to liven up and deepen their experience.

Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Since he took up the directorship of the National Dance Theater at the Palais de Chaillot just a few years back, Rachid Ouramdane has been playing with the dance + sport/athletics theme, especially through his work with the 19-member cie XY circus troupe. Cie XY is, perhaps, an expression of Ouramdane’s looking to blaze a trail, as he told the webzine Danses avec la plume, towards “diversity within a common culture” - e pluribus unum, as the US dollar puts it.

Karine and I saw Cie XY’s Möbius in early September. The show was first of all a demonstration of very intense, carefully choreographed, up-close and physical interaction. From the beginning, a seeming casual confidence in which truly remarkable feats were executed highlighted the individual responsibility of each performer to the rest as well as to the whole troupe. Real physical contrasts among performers and an obvious distribution of roles by tested capacity and choreographic goal rather than by gender or even size and other “visible criteria” – catching a body that has casually leapt 20 feet in the air takes more than will, after all, even if the catcher doesn’t have to be male, 7-foot high –  drove home this reified interdependence. Think of Möbius as a perfection in which proprioception, empathy and compassion have replaced common sense, morality and reason.

Karine and I both saw dance in it. But a pair, at least, of our fellow spectators, felt Möbius remained sport, saying dance is a story the performers tell about themselves while sport is a test of the human body. For them, while the performers did tell their story, the performance lacked “poésie” – that quality of going beyond itself, the “self-transcendence” where Christine Towle sees sport becoming dance. Karine agrees but claims that the perfection of cie XY’s movement together by itself created dance. Insufficiency in the self-story and poésie, she says, is the responsibility of the choreographer, adding that the same disconnect of performance-movement and choreography-performance happens in Swan Lake – “dance dance”.

So, I think I’ve identified about seven ways of approaching the couple “dance + sport”. Sport becomes dance by surpassing itself; sport is a form of dance; dance is a form of sport; dance and sport are part of a larger art of movement; movement is dance, whatever you call it. As to my own idea, for the moment, I have decided that while dance cannot be competitive, sport must be. I’m with my fellow Möbius spectators: the goals make dance and sport chalk and cheese. It’s intention and perception that make them different and physics that makes them alike.

Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone

“Failles”, Jean-Christophe Bleton, Laurence Bertagnol: Dance for all. Photo: Patrick Girard © couleursurlaville

Through their dance troupe cie Les Orpailleurs (“Gold-Panners”), Jean-Christophe Bleton and Laurence Bertagnol run an annual open dance program called Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationnel et participative. GRCIP, for short. The course, which includes participants ranging in age from six to sixty-nine, is one among the different choreographic initiatives sponsored by Micadanses, about whose Bien Fait program, among other things, I wrote at the end of last year: Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination.

At the beginning of this past Summer, cie Les Orpailleurs presented a tight and charming 15-minute dance performance called Failles, Chemins de Lumière* (“Cracks, ways to light”) at Micadanse’s annual (mostly) amateur Fait Maison program. Failles mixed amateur dancers under 12 and over 60 so well that it got me wondering whether older folk have positive age-specific qualities, so I decided to talk about it with Bleton and Bertagnol.

I got my thinking redirected and gained a better perspective in the process.  

“Failles” Photo: Patrick Girard©couleursurlaville

And not difference in the way I’ve mostly thought of it, either.

As I listened to them, I realized that, born in mid-twentieth century America, some “difference” or another has been a life-theme: from difference within my clan and family to religion, race, status and economic difference, and, God knows, more, in society and culture as a whole. For me difference has been lines in the sand to erase, problems to be solved. I hacked through “difference” with politics, murmuring, “equality”.

In the early 80s, I even joined the democratic socialists. And that was that. Until, one day, in my later twenties, I met this girl from another country, another religion and another color. I liked this girl and she me. One day, she asked, What do you think of me? I said, a bit too breezily, “Why, you’re like me”.

She exploded like Donald Duck catching Huey, Dewey and Louie reading science fiction while circle-jerking: “I am not like you. I am like me.”

Politics has no answer to “you and me”. My personal solution to difference as felt by my sweet friend’s felt and inscrutable Otherness has been to pull the covers up over my head and mumble something… nice, if I can.

Bleton and Bertagnol don’t have any definitive answer to the ineffable difference inovolved in human Otherness, either, but in how they understand and practice dance they’ve developed a pertinent approach to dealing with it.

First off, for them, “difference” isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a solution to embrace. Realizing one’s own Otherness is a way to own it. In owning it one can at least relate with that apparently blocking “I am not like you. I am like me.”

Dance, which Bleton calls its own language and Bertagnol characterizes as “access to a sensorial, organic, and alternate reality of pensée incarnée ”, is a way to own one’s difference.

Dance research. Photo ©Cie Les Orpailleurs

The long-time partners agree, too, that “dance is a dangerous art” because it is free, and belongs only to the person who practices it. “That’s why contemporary dance scares people,” says Bleton. “It lets you conquer your own freedom”.

His, Bertagnol’s, work in dance, Bleton says, boils down to a “political commitment to democratize it, to bring it to people who, for whatever reason, might not otherwise have access to it.”

Though their terminology and goals – indeed, the whole self-expression side of contemporary dance performance can seem to run very close to the language of therapy – the pair are very clear that their concern is dance, the art. Bertagnol notes that individual motivations for joining GRCIP programs may range from trying to deal with body shame, to the pleasure of being in a group project, to self-liberation, to the pure pleasure of dancing, but her and her friend and partner’s goal is to give access to the art of dance. In the same ways, perhaps, as older professionals bring their professional experience to bear, Bertagnol continues, amateurs bring their life experience to dance.

The GRCIP approach works in spite of handicaps such as the widespread belief that contemporary dance is for nobs only – “If we were doing hip hop, recruiting might be easier,” Bertagnol observes – but barriers persist also in the form of masculine gendering and beliefs about “what is appropriate for a person like me”.

The groups that have come together, Bleton says, are resilient: “Groups do adjust to a lot of coming and going, the ebb and flow of normal life – kids who change schools or who enter a new life stage with new goals or younger adults who blend into work and family life.” And the groups last as they transform: they follow on each other through time, through individuals, through families and through generations, diversifying socio-cultural origins and horizons as families diversify. No matter the particular make up of a group, Bleton concludes, it always finds a communion in the effort to define itself in front of its audience.

I’m going to give Jean-Christophe Bleton’s and Laurence Bertagnol’s Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationel et participative a try this year. How about you?  

__________________________________

The GRCIP is open to a free try.

For Fall 2022 the dates are as follows:

• 1 October from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces
• 29 October from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces
• 19 November from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :May B
• 10 December from 16:00 to 19:00 Micadanses, Room :Noces

For more information

Groupe de recherche chorégraphique Intergenerationnel et participative

For dates in 2023, contact Micadanses

For other GRCIP dates and other courses at Micadanses: Micadanses

*Failles, Laurence Bertagnol & Jean-Christophe Bleton, cie Les Orpailleurs 

“Il y a une fissure en toutes choses, c’est ainsi qu’entre la lumière” – Anthem, Leonard Cohen
There is a crack, a crack in everything /That's how the light gets in … Anthem, Leonard Cohen

In collaboration with the student dance program at collège Politzer de Bagnolet
Music and performance: Guillaume Bleton/ Production: cie les Orpailleurs/ Production supports: Jocus, Conservatoire Erik Satie de Bagnolet. Performance : Micadanses, 24 June 2022

B.girl, choreographer, member of the jury: Valentine Nagata-Ramos on evaluating Olympic break dance

Daughter of a mother from Spain and a father from Japan, French breaker and contemporary performer and choreographer Valentine Nagata-Ramos grew up in the suburbs of Paris. Photo courtesy cie Uzumaki © Joël el Hadj

One day, when we were still both at home, my younger brother was trying to show me his new painting while I was telling him “the story” I thought his painting was telling me.

Bertie interrupted me and said something like ahem! haw, if you look ahem! haw, here and here and here ahem! haw, in that order, you might ahem! haw … I stared at him, bowled over, realizing that, of course, there are a zillion ways to look at something. All I had to do was look at a start point and imagine a path to an end point.

This scene of brotherly exasperation comes to mind because I’ve been asking myself lately what start points, paths and end points work best when it comes to appreciating dance performance (see: Wanted: A five-points-on-a-post-it-note guide to enjoying live dance performance). And, Poof! Synchronicity waddles across the face of the Sun and I learn break choreographer and dancer Valentine Nagata Ramos is sitting on break dance juries across the globe. I call her up and we talk on Zoom.

Valentine tells me that candidates for the début Olympic break dance competition in Paris 2024 have to go through a competitive validation process established by the World Dance Sport Federation. Her jury service, at least in part, is part of that process.

I ask her how she and her fellow jury members evaluate break dancing? What are their start points, paths and end points?

It goes without saying, we both believe, that the start point for evaluating, assessing or appreciating anything at all, but especially a thing like dance performance which are their own products, is some experience of it as a participant or active observer.

So, a jury person must be attuned to the physical reality of the thing as it happens.

Also, Valentine says, peer recognition of a jury person’s performance and creation credentials also counts for much because, of course, it legitimates the evaluation in the eyes of those being judged, but also, perhaps even more important, peer recognition of each other’s accomplishments authenticates jury members among themselves.

Important, too, Valentine tells me, is the “family” perspective that sustains break-dance as a human enterprise within the art of movement. Break dance might be big business but it’s big natural human business. In terms of the break-dance enterprise, Valentine sees her new role as a jury member as part of her career development, just like any ambitious professional. But at the same time, her career development happens and has significance within the framework of a “family”. She sees herself as among the first generation of breakers in France. She feels she is working for a third generation that is looking to establish a life and personality of its own. She can look on her family’s “third generation” with a certain dispassion … one might say, with an elder’s or grandparent’s positive detachment.

For a serious breaker – serving on a jury or being evaluated by one –  Valentine says, becoming a potential champion comes down to mastery: of “technique, footwork, and power”.

She describes technique as held positions, including top rock, upper body movement or gesture – getting and keeping your upper body loose – especially the arms and hands, and freeze – positions that are extremely athletic but stationary, such as holding the body lateral on single handstand (seeming to lie in the air). Footwork is the complex elegance of dance steps and/or of lower-body movement. Power, she concludes, is the ability to direct physical force, especially, project a distinct personality. To understand how high the technical requirement for break dance is – I recommend trying a single trial of a break dance session – in terms of control, precision and endurance in elegance, ballet has nothing on break.

Mastery of technique, footwork and power are just the price of admission to professional break, Valentine says: technique, footwork and power must articulate as a dance personality. Do lower body and/or upper body, lower body, upper body and/or gesture go together? If they do, how so? Do the moves “make sense” together? It is around the perception of these questions of articulation that experience, respect of peers and confidence of belonging and contributing to the break family come together to enable a jury person’s evaluation.

Valentine uses the analogy of “found words” or what I think of as “poetry”: a breaker brings together available words (movements) in ways that speak about themselves and for or to the observer.

In evaluating articulation, as a jury member, Valentine has to first decide at what point she stops hearing words or phrases and begins discern a verse: Dog puppy love? Puppy dog love? Puppy love dog? Dog loves puppy? The dog loves its puppy?

And, if and when the words and phrases seem to her to articulate into verses, is she hearing real poetry or amusing but random sounds? Is there art in it?  

Because so many powerful, technically formidable and choreographically savvy break dancers learn uniquely by imitation, Valentine remarks, many have never had the opportunity to absorb this notion of articulation – the transition from words to verse, so to say. So, many a very technically masterful breaker washes out without really understanding why they washed out or how they should go forward.

The link of lack of formal education with subsequent wash out also shows up as lack of context as a breaker moves towards “versifying”, observes Valentine. For instance, they will use a borrowed “phrase” – two linked moves – combining, say, a vigorous back spin and a flying windmill, without understanding the choreographic “verse” of which the phrase was originally a part, which can be interpreted both as lack of professional knowledge and as an offense against family morality; there’s even a word for it, a “biter”, a plagiarist.

Once a jury member has decided a sufficient level of technical mastery and evaluated the poetry of its articulation, Valentine continues, scoring break dance is not like scoring skating or gymnastics. There is no direct system of points attached to technique or gesture. 

Break juries instead assign their values to observations on the dancer’s “body, mind and soul”. Body, in contrast with technique, implies that technique and footwork have been assimilated into the posture and gesture of the body at rest.

We might say that body references the level of transformation of ability and potential into skill and competence.

Mind references creativity – the skill of articulating mastery – technique, footwork and especially power, the ability to project strength in personality – into a “poetry of movement” .

Soul references the fluidity and appropriateness of the break performance, a breaker’s skill at dominating the environment with their personality.

Soul, Valentine says, is both instinctive and unique to the performer and one of those indescribable things that everybody senses. As a result, soul is the strongest visual or experiential argument of the performer but the least quantifiable or arguable for the jury or spectators.

Valentine points to the battle between the reigning US champion Victor in Victor vs Jeffro Bboy Finals│The World Games 2022 Breaking. In this battle, Valentine observes, the body and mind of champion Victor are just so, so outstandingly strong that it would be impossible to explain his loss – to him, to spectators, even to Jeffro – if he were to lose. Yet, both jury and spectators are deeply moved as Jeffro channels excellent body and mind to a truly distinct and attractive personality. It is hard not to feel a certain regret over Jeffro’s second place but harder still to argue a first place over Victor. Click the link just above and do your own evaluation. Just below I’ve listed a couple of links Valentine has shared so that you can get some practical experience in judging dance from your armchairs.  

I am sorry to say that Valentine reports that Olympic break will be gender segregated. Though at the moment dominated by boys and young men, break dance is in principle and by custom mixed-gender dance performance. As in other areas of endeavor, as girls and young women have in recent years felt freer to practice equality, they have been more and more present in break dance.

Valentine’s own performances and creations, including her (exclusively female break dance) b.girl troupe performance, have all the strengths and qualities that characterize good break art and technique. When all is said and done, she feels that in technique, footwork and power, men and women balance out. Mixed-gender crews (teams, troupes) and battles certainly better represent the reality of break dance performance.

As outlined in this essay, the system for evaluating break performance certainly enables assessments that successfully balance quantifiables and qualities (cf. Victor vs Jeffro, above) without falling into the rigid gender trap.

You may like to practice Valentine’s system. In addition to Victor vs Jeffro, she has kindly provided three suitable battles for trying your hand: Ayumi vs Qingyi Bgirl 3rd Place│The World Games 2022 Breaking ; Jeffro vs Dany Dann Bboy Top 8│The World Games 2022 Breaking ; Phil Wizard vs Shigekix Bboy Top 8│The World Games 2022 Breaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sean Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Rise, Sun !

The atoms dance !

Souls undone in ecstasy dance !

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

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

You should know, the atoms are like crazy folk,

Each one, happy or poor, each

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post your three to five “keys” or “dance performance access points” in the commentary to this article or send them by mail to [email protected] . Add the name of the performance and the date you saw it, along with a link to the summary and details of the performance.

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

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

Interview protocol

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

Argument:

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

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

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

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

Example: response entry 

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

Example: full interview note

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

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

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

Post your three to five “keys” or “dance performance access points” in the commentary to this article or send them by mail to [email protected] . Add the name of the performance and the date you saw it, along with a link to the summary and details of the performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home

And come to the conclusion that we live

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

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

I laugh.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put Lina Lapelytè on your bucket list.

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

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

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

These words and these persons move me.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three dance-performances in dance critical language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Débandade”, Olivia Grandville. Photo © Marc Domage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conjuring music is, obviously, no mean feat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Après tout is very different to RESTER.

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

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

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

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

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

Put Marie Desoubeaux on your Paris dance experience bucket list.