“Ghosts” cast: Jeanne Alechinsky, background, with musician collaborators Jacques Salamaka and Julie Appéré. Photo © Isabelle Chemin, Paramour Compagnie, 2025
My next-to-eldest brother, Joe, now deceased, said of our childhood house that a body so inclined could always find a signed first edition of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, a 5-ton differential axle or a worn yellow rubber bath duck. Indeed, my parents essentially roped off an area of the house where we kids were free to do pretty much as we pleased. And we pleased to do a rural slum with junkyard and life library, to make an unnatural condominium of magpie and pig, faun and wolf.
My brother, Peter, the oldest of a couple three natural musicians among us, would sometimes spend hours plonked in the middle of our junkyard slum, deaf, mute, systematically contemplating the different declensions of vibration flowing out from his guitar with wahwah, new in those days. Sometimes, the vibe would make us all slow to a stop while the air thickened and shimmered, things and people took on a vibrato glow.
I bring this up because it’s the remembrance Jeanne Alechinsky’s Ghosts work-in-progress inspired in me.
Ghosts, Alechinsky writes, themes around the visible us with the “invisible” – the shimmer and glow to the world that Peter naively conjured with his guitar, I think. She conjures quite deliberately by putting musicians Jacques Salamaka, with a drum set, and Julie Appéré, with bass guitar, on stage, at the limit of performance space. Alechinsky herself is at the center, wears regular-fit silver pants, a white top, shares her space with a chair with a white dust cover slightly behind, to the right. This is what I saw when the lights come on.
“Ghosts” logo by Jeanne Alechinsky. Photo © Jeanne Alechinsky, Paramour Compagnie
I can’t recall whether action begins when I realize that Alechinsky has either assumed or innovated the gestural tropes of talking to the invisible and somebody talking to their cell phone or when Julie Appéré makes everything and everybody shiver with a loud long, rich note or subtle chord thrump on her bass.
Not too terribly long ago, before smartphones and Bluetooth, talking to the air meant “crazy person”. Now talking in the air has evolved to signify either talking with another person or with your ghost. We’ve mostly learned to tell the difference. Alechinsky has noticed this and used it. It’s important. Here’s a proof of meaningful evolution of a visual figure and also that the transformation is choreographed into a “lexicon” or, better, a “vidicon” of dance: an entry for Mathieu Bouvier’s Atlas.
But it’s not just that with choreography and dance Alechinsky conjures the shimmer and glow of vibrato we sometimes hear and see in the subjects and objects around us.
Her dance performance gets across the nature of the “ghosts” and the “invisible”, that, based on my own long-ago first experience of it, I think she’s talking about. Spectators, as I was, are drawn into and stimulated by the sound and presence of the musicians. But Alechinsky is always strangely parallel and there amidst. Her movement does not flow with the swells of the bass and her pace is not rhythmed by the beat of the drum. She does that I guess because ghosts (and the invisible) are individual and states, insides and outsides, bordered and not, felt and not. Her figures have to point in all directions at once but at somewhere rather than nowhere. And by seeming to do all that, she does. So, visually, while Alechinsky seems physically is pierced to the root, seems to run into walls and move mountains, to hear and chase voices, to see and be seen by the unseen, she projects the sensibility of, and the spectator experiences instead of sympathetic physical feeling, awareness – the sense of slowing to a brief stop within the shimmer and glow of reality.
As I was hurrying out – it was the middle of the working day, after all – I was thinking that my headline for Alechinsky’s Ghosts might be, à la click bait…
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I saw “Ghosts”, a work-in-progress dance performance by Jeanne Alechinsky and musicians Jacques Salamaka, playing drums, and Julie Appéré, bass guitar, on 27 March 2025 as part of the Open Space program at Théâtre Etoile du Nord. “Ghosts” in expected to premiere at Etoile du Nord in September 2025.
Other works in progress on 27 March included Prouesses de l’Echec N°17 (“Adventures in failure N#17”) by Collectif Format A3, from a concept by Sylvain Ollivier and written and performed in collaboration with David Lelièvre and Julie Mouton and “De Diaboli” by Christine Armanger and performed by her and Clémentine Vanlerberghe.
“Prouesses” features a hilarious take on Dunning and Kruger syndrome, which posits, rather ominously for humanity, I think, that while incompetents overestimate their level of ability and are perfectly unaware of this, they discount demonstrated competence in others. Armanger’s piece uses a devil-invoked robot (drone) dog to explore the shaping effects of technology on human outcomes. De Diaboli is programmed for the Faits d’Hiver 2026 dance festival.
