[FRASQ] #10, “Rencontre de la performance”, begins its 10th year of multidisciplinary performance at the Générateur in Gentilly from 6 to 20 October 2018, it's worth a bus ride, let alone a mass.
Chloé Silbano, a painter of the ineffable details of human movement also has a taste for then making somehow apt performances around them. She invited me to see one her oddly apt events at an event called FRASQ#2 at a place called the Générateur in a place called Gentilly, which kisses the bottom of the 13th arrondissement in the far south.
Gentilly, strangely, is directly linked to the Porte de Bagnolet in the north east by the 57 bus, hardly any walking involved. Also, Silbano’s performances tend to radiate a sort of butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth humor that tickles as much as perplexes me. So I went. Wine, Sir! More wine!
This astonishing 57 bus brings those passengers boarding in the northeast and who might just wish it, to, virtually, in front of the Générateur. Unsurprisingly, I’ve realized, if one but adds 5+7, one obtains the number 12, which of course denotes Shiva’s divine aspects and is of course divisible into four groups of three, which of course is the number of the mystery of the one true God.
A frasque is an “escapade”, associated with the sense of “flabby” or “flaccid,” suggesting unfinished work or work that doesn’t meet expectations: “Ray-gun, indeed, Ms. So-Called Inventor. Why, it hardly slows up even the drunks.”
I mention the etymology not because I am a Monday evening etymologist but because FRASQ takes a “happening” approach to performance. Performers are asked to show the “undone” or, as one might say, “not yet hardened”, and also “not to worry about making art”, creating out of savoir-faire but also out of their knowledge about how not to create.
The aim of this intelligent non-creativity and up-to-the-last-second fluidity is to renew the performance genre by getting away from the routine of creation. The performance notes in June boasted as if it were a positive good that nobody really knew when the thing, whatever it would actually turn out to be, would start, and declared, not without a certain theatrical meter:
Devant: le néant. / In front, nothingness / Cannon to right of them,
À droite: le big-bang. / On the right, the Big Bang/ Cannon to left of them,
Pendant: du contact, des regards, des tensions, des sensations. / During : contact, glances, tensions, sensations/ Cannon in front of them
Partout: le plaisir simple d’être là. / Everywhere: the simple pleasure to be there/ Volleyed and thundered;
La suite? Au prochain épisode de SHOW YOUR FRASQ/ What then? The next episode of SHOW YOUR FRASQ/ Boldly rode they, and well, …
At the Générateur, many different performances happen simultaneously in the same open space. Performers must take account of each other and one another’s doings, as well as of spectators. These are themselves milling about, obliged to choose not only between contents, but also between media as well as how they themselves will watch and participate.
During FRASQ#2, for instance, among other diverse artists and sedentary and itinerant pieces, were Coline Joufflineau’s échantillons de possible (“samples of possibility”), consisting of undoing and renewing a single twisted strand of string (the creating process was selfied so one could watch on a giant screen). This fascinating business was going on it plain view of Bernard Bousquet & Anna Ten absorbed in an unnamed process of doing up a naked body in silk screen and then heavily draping same in paper and fabric – reminding me that, as on earth as in quantum mechanics, the apparent is also the invisible – also Anna Ten was gorgeous, the painting was gorgeous. Then there was the scrupulously immobile Miss LNI in veil and breasts, whose advertising offered Virgin kisses at a discount less than half what a Whore’s cost – classically funny and then… not. It turned into something quite different in the end.*
On-the-hoof creation, theatricality, crowding, competing, cooperating, milling and choosing generates good humor and lets the onlooker think about it all. What sticks firmly in my mind is that every performer and every performance comes across as concentrated on creating something worth being there for. There were no statements and, for once, intention was subordinate to done.
The FRASQ performances are something to follow.
*Other performers for the incredibly diverse FRASQ#2 included: Sabina Caminade, Sonia Cedhant, François Régis Daumal, Eléanore Didier, Anne Sarah Faget, Deed Julius, Cyril Leclerc, Marin Marie, Marie Martinez-Liense, David Noir, Morgan Pihet, Marc Planceon, Jérôme Poret, Adrien Solis, Elisabeth Saint-Jalmes, Aurélie Dubois, Alberto Sorelli
Comments