A couple of months ago, a neighbor over the street with whom Karine, my partner, has only ever had a nodding acquaintance, decided to move to Berlin, to be with her younger son. The neighbor, a 60-something mother also of two other grown children, a pretty fair hobby painter and who speaks only French remarks, “Why not? I’ve never been to Berlin”.
Emptying her apartment, the neighbor put at least the last 30 years of her many self-portraits, as well as portraits of friends and family, in the street for trash pickup. Coming back from a movie, Karine saw the portraits, and brought them all into her house. She has festooned the living room and mezzanine with them.
Now, I often find myself contemplating these portraits. There seems such mysterious familiarity in people! Whether they are familiar because over the years of being in the neighborhood I’ve actually seen or experienced these particular faces and their attitudes, or because the different seemings depicted in the portraits hold a mirror to my own seemings, or because there are only really such a small number of human types in the world that everybody and their portraits everywhere eventually become familiar, I just don’t know.
All this come to mind because Marion Zurbach’s Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”), which I saw the other day as part of the selection of the Festival Artdanthé 2025, deals in mysterious familiarities, too. Only not in human interactions, seemings or types, but the mysteriousness of human movement.
Zurbach’s piece is based on Orchésographie, said to be the first known manual of dance and the first instance of choreographic notation, too. Orchésographie has a priest teaching a lawyer pretty much all the types of dance step current in the 16th Century. The symbolic relationship of priest and lawyer is “Auctoritas docet legem”: God informs the laws that govern people. The different dance steps represent the different human characteristics. So, at the Renaissance, at least, dance is a general declaration on the mechanics of life: Authority informs the law which interprets it into the different choreographies that create the dance of life here-below.
Something like that.
Except under Marion Zurbach’s auctoritas and the fine interpretation herself and her collaborator-performers Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, Orchésographie’s rather recondite premise becomes a lively improvisation of a continuous flow of dance – a happening – that seems to have more to do with the relation of movement to environment to light to space to sound to symbolism and what we believe and suppose.
Here’s how i Les Héritiers-x rolled out for me, which, since happening comes on and carries a body along so early on, is not necessarily how it rolled out for anybody else, choreographer included. It seems to me that discrete things happen through little cues: add a bit of sound or attitude or both or a prop, or a light, or a gesture or, since Zurbach doesn’t use her inputs to imperialize, there’s room for the spectator to share the piece’s sensibilities.
At the back of the stage, by a woman in the front row calling moves and marking time, two performers, both imaginatively, but not outlandishly, dressed in gaudy corselets and short pants, are brought forward. They move by numbers, OK – But numbers of what nature? Are they really under instruction from that woman? Is the simpering and flustering part of it? Is this a game or a reconstitution or some sort of effort to get at an essence by a performing ménage à trois? – with – what I suppose are proper facial attitudes – handholding and steps – I believe – are prescribed – by the manual Orchésographie. And then after what comes before, there’s jigs and part-singing and all sorts of prancing that I can’t recall because I kept putting my pencil down to watch.
Don't get the idea that my stream of broken consciousness hints at confusion in the performance. Not at all. It just un-stuck or de-stuck me in time: it’s hard to express a rational break up of narrative linearity into a happening or a form of the process of perception. Les Héritiers-x rather declares that past and present are of a piece.
The long and short of it is that Les Héritiers-x is both a Marion Zurbach-inspired early 21st century love and dance show and an honest reconstitution of a (pretty-much imagined) Renaissance when Auctoritas et Legem freely cooed and simpered. Zurbach, with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, create a happening that both carries me and enables me to carry forward and backward, around and through, the “inheritance” of Orchésographie.
Les Héritiers-x is satisfyingly dizzying dance, capital D.
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I saw “Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach performed by and in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton as part of Festival Arthdanthé at Théâtre de Vanves on 7 March 2025, with sound composition by Stélios Lazarou, dance coaching, singing and musical arrangement by Madeleine Saur, writing assistance by Arthur Eskenazi and costumes by Silvia Romanelli.