Spotlight on mission and tradition and esthetics and politics
For May, June & July, the first entries of Paris Performance Calendar feature selected billings from Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis, an annual festival of international contemporary choreography making the international scene.
Rencontres sees itself carrying on an avant garde esthetic mission and contemporary social engagement – “cultivating fresh contemporary choreography that presents a sharp, poetic look at the world around” – and a tradition – it’s been nearly 50 years since Jaque Chaurand founded a show-case for la nouvelle danse française with the Concours de Bagnolet/Les Ballets Pour Demain, which Rencontres claims as its organizational forerunner.
And it’s true.
Despite profound social, political and cultural change in France, in dance and in Rencontres' own organization since Les Ballets started up in 1969, Rencontres still has the noos – the sense of theory, practice and trending themes – that enables dance and performance lovers to accept and then to enjoy – to unblushingly and-and – the very different performance fare of deeply individual choreographic expression. … And Lisbeth Gruwez and Paula Pi and Daniel Eveillée and Oona Doherty and Yu-Ju Lin and Ashley Chen and Marco Berrettini and Mylène Benoit and Giuseppe Chico & Barbara Matijević and...
And-and is as much part of the tradition as of the mission. Among the better-known winners of Chaurand’s Concours de Bagnolet, are choregrapher’s like Maguy Marin, who premiered an agitprop modern-dance performance, deux-mille-dix-sept, this past December, Philippe Decouflé, who founded his Cie DCA – Diversity, Comradeship, Agility –troupe in Bagnolet in 1983) and whose technically-recherché Nouvelles Pièces Courtes is featured in May at the Palais de Chaillot and Angelin Preljocaj, whose classy Blanche Neige ballet opens on to summer at La Villette at the end of June.
With performances, in principle, only in the Seine Saint Denis department, Rencontres embodies the one time marriage of liberal, internationalist and progressive culture values with illiberal leftist politics and an ongoing tendency to express its politics in left-wing terms. Though it is hard to imagine, let alone properly describe, the ins and outs of a politics that allies an essentially hyper-aesthetic, individualist, expressionist dance movement with a concrete-obsessed, rough and tough communist leadership struggling to house and feed succeeding waves of workers from Europe, then from across the world, this alliance happened and continues to have consequences. It enabled Chaurand to find a home for his “future ballets” in Bagnolet, a petite-couronne town bordering the 20th arrondissement approximately between the Porte de Lilas and the Porte de Montreuil, where Rencontres’ administration remains. And, entirely by chance, of course, a dance concours in red popular Bagnolet is in itself an interesting contrast to blue bourgeois Paris.
The alliance seems to have worked for everybody however, people and bourgeois. While contemporary dance and performance has prospered, so has Bagnolet: ugly concrete high-rises and rumbling flyovers notwithstanding, the town is a more than acceptable place for people to live and have a drink. It’s a fantasy, of course, but it’s possible to see this unlikely and-and alliance in the streets of the town: a rue Danton and a rue Robespierre and a rue Lenine and a rue Angela Davis and a rue Marie-Anne Colombier (a notable 19th-Century actress, partner to Sarah Berhardt, and later, a writer most remembered for her still-amusing parody of the iconic Bernhardt, Les Mémoires de Sarah Barnum).
Along with giving the inheritors of the nouvelle danse française and international creators space on, respectively, the international and France scene, Rencontres has situated, and situates today, in a geography that points to an important, wider socio-political tensions and challenges. As a new political order tries to shape social and economic France – and, inevitably, its culture policy – for the century to come, it seems increasingly likely that the stages on which Rencontres’ is set will become symbols in a struggle over culture policy.
Over the years, Seine Saint-Denis has, as have other localities, developed a lot of performance space and dedicated culture staff, all local testament to a long-running state policy of widening access to culture and education, begun especially from 1969 onwards. The concrete (literally, concrete) proofs of the policy’s success provide the venues for Rencontres: just for instance, L'Embarcadère auditorium in Aubervilliers culture complex, the venue for Oona Doherty’s latest episode of Hard To Be Soft or the MC93 theater in Bobigny, venue for the premier of Giuseppe Chico's & Barbara Matijević's Our Daily Performance.
Under economic pressure before the route of the old parties last year, discussions on what culture policy should look like from here forward have just begun.
That’s because the policy goes beyond the financing of institutions to national prestige, the public responsibility for cultural development. Today, Seine Saint Denis, with its diverse populations and heavy legacy investment in high-culture infrastructure uses culture development as a lever for social inclusion and integration. Although not included as a Rencontres’ venue, Théâtre Louis Aragon’s (http://www.theatrelouisaragon.fr) successful and fun Territoires de la danse community choreographic projects is a good example of the approach.
As an institution and an event, Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis is a show and a stage worth seeing. It is dance performance showcase and today the staging ground for the esthetics and themes of dance and performance in France and Europe, the theater of cultural and social change.
Will and-and esthetics and politics survive? ‘Zat is zee question, as French people like to say (in English).
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