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.
