I’ve always liked the expression haut comme trois pommes. It means “rather (darlingly) little”.
Haut comme trois pommes –three apples high – always comes to my mind with little kids, the ones between one-and a half or two and four – just learning the basics of troubling the world with long stares, grunts of restless effort, crawling, grabbing, stumbling, holding, walking, a regard, a coo that becomes a burble that becomes a brook that becomes a stream that becomes a river of words that becomes, splash, whizz-bang: a person. A person haut comme trois pommes.
Sometimes, these little pommes are of a noos not canny, something I was reminded of when I was sitting at a picnic table at the Cartoucherie – in June? I was waiting to see a dance performance put on by the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson.
It must have been June, because at the Cartoucherie, formerly a gunpowder and bullet factory situated behind the Parc floral de Paris and made famous by Ariane Mnouchkine’s innovative Théâtre du Soleil, I – or you – can sit outside under the trees, eat and drink nice food and build a good time. The Atelier de Paris’ different stages and studios are dug and plugged into or shared with the Cartoucherie.
Also, before the program begins, you can hone your powers of observation by staring at people. Honing my own powers of observation is how I happened to see the flaming-red-haired kid haut comme trois pommes, Hans im Glück – straight out of Grimm.
Honestly, at hardly two-foot tall, Lucky Hans was too small to join with the mixed group of pre-teens and daddies on the make-do soccer field away to the right. All on his own, this prodigy of human development was positively riding a full-size soccer ball through rough grass and battered playground stuff.
Memory! I could only have observed Lucky Hans outside in nice weather, so I was certainly at the Atelier for last year’s edition of the annual June Events dance performance program.
Was it maybe for Daniel Léveillé’s Quatuor Tristesse? Or Loïc Touzé’s Forme Simple? Hard to say. Last year, for instance, over a bit fewer than 30 days, June Events featured more than 100 dance and musical performers and presented 30 creations, 16 of them new.
The Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, currently under the direction of Anne Sauvage, took up residence at the Cartoucherie in 1999.
Since its founding, it has become a key player in dance performance development. As coordinating organization for Paris Réseau Dance, it collaborates creatively with dance and performance innovators at Etoile du Nord, the Regard du cygne studio and MICADANCE-ADDP.
Creations produced (or co-produced with) by the Atelier in the various dance festivals such as Rencontres internationales en Seine Saint Denis or the Festival d’Automne as well as in theaters in Paris east of the Hôtel de Ville such as Théâtre de la Bastille, the municipal Théâtre Berthelot in near-suburb Montreuil, the neighborhood-oriented Paris Anim’ Centre Montgallet in the 12th arrondissement or Le Générateur, a performance-art venue in the near southeast suburb of Gentilly.
Just at the end of the city bus lines, in the long translucent shadows of early summer, going to the Atelier de Paris makes for an evening in a kind of ideal country château. For the citadin out for a bit of green space and fresh air, the château’s clever residents dish out creative sorcery: juxtapositions of choreography and scenario, of dance and performance, of theme and content. Sometimes, with the aplomb of an antique chamber orchestra playing familiar melodies you just can’t place, a performance at the château slips into emotional exaltation.
I am thinking of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s pure-dance pieces, Relative Collider, To Claude Shannon and Maps, whose physics and psycholinguistics manage to cross the border into magic. Presented as a triptych, the three dances closed out Santoro & Godard’s three-year stint as associates as well as opened the Atelier’s Fall 2018 program. Illustrating the Atelier’s diversity in creative productions, the program closed on performance choreographer Joanne Leighton’s fascinating I am sitting in a room, a visual study of how the sitting position fits into the immediate world, and Joris Lacoste’s Noyau ni fixe (“Center nor held”) on the magical power of words.
The Atelier’s 2019 winter season, which reflects both its institutional role and creative and production collaboration, has opened with Yasmine Hugonnet’s Chro no lo gi cal, which dances time as perceived by the body’s breath, its eye and its step. This reflection on time is followed by Rush, a two-person choreography of running into and getting on top of each other by Ashley Chen, which in turn opens onto Sylvère Lamotte’s L’Echo d’un infini (“Echo of an infinity”), which uses the possibilities of contact in dance to explore present life and the sediments of past ones.
The Atelier’s spring offerings are co-produced with the Théatre de la Bastille and, for Northern Ireland’s Oona Doherty, the Biennale de Danse du Val de Marne.
Doherty presents her lively cinematic, almost-a-musical studies of British conundrum, Lady Magma and Hard to be soft - A Belfast prayer, while Israel’s Shira Eviatar’s Body Roots/Rising tries to perform a political genealogy – looking at her “Mizrahi” – Jews of Middle Eastern, “semitic”, origin. Nina Santes, an Atelier de Paris associate, presents her 2018 creation, the stage-abolishing Hymen Hymne, a dance performance on witchery, inspired by the eco-feminist neo-pagan personality Starhawk. Santes’ participative coven is followed on by “body musician” Simon Mayer’s SunBengSitting, a performance that puts together Tyrolean vocalizing and folk dance and contemporary and urban dance.
So, if I forget, precisely, why I was in a position to watch Hans im Glück, I was surely to the Cartoucherie on the
chance to see something, at the very least, interesting at the Atelier de Paris.
So, I sat there at the picnic table wondering, What bewitched raven had flapped Lucky Hans-haut-comme-trois-pommes up out of Grimm and dropped him in range of my senses?
I called out to some likely-looking women picnicking on the grass.
“Who belongs to the boy”? I pointed into the distance.
The raven turned out to be a red-crested 30-something whose link with the prodigy seemed hard to doubt.
She hopped with alacrity onto the picnic table, perching right next to me, as if we’d known each other lo! these 30 years or more. She began to talk.
It seems Lucky Hans, the prodigious soccer boy-genius, is prodigious in every aspect of life.
Even after almost three years of 24-hour care and caring for other young kids besides, my red-crest raven friend was still as amazed and touched as I.
“He’s so well-brought up, you see”, I mean,” she said looking down shyly, “He was well-brought up before being born to me”.
She smiled, looked a little embarrassed.
“From the moment we met, he’s been a perfect gentleman. He seemed to tell me right off, ‘I am a noble houseguest. My needs are privilege, a joy…” she paused.
“My boy is not wrong. In fact, he’s right. Absolutely right”.
My habitual smile twitched a little.
I said, referencing the scene in the Spielberg movie where the doe-eyed alien squeaks ‘Home’, “… As if you’d pulled back that little baby hoodie and saw it was E.T. under it.”
Making her own quite serious doe-eyes, she answered, “Yes”.
“Parfaitement.” She nodded vigorously. “Since Lucky Hans’s come along, I’ve come to realize that a solid knowledge of magic is worth much more than my degree in physics… “.
Then, all in a rush, she exclaimed, “What can explain it, do you think?”
She pointed to a fashionably rough-shaven, ruffle-topped, sweating 30-something playing horde-soccer in the adjoining field. Two pre-teen children wove in orbit around him.
“That’s my husband… And my other two kids… All we are is attractive,” she laughed, again embarrassed.
I understand that embarrassment.
This mother of three might be thirty years younger and be the red crest raven sent by the shades of Grimm and she might be the true mother of Hans in Glück. E.T. might be her progeny. But she was brought up, just like I was, believing that not finding an explanation among the river of words that flood from us after two years of life is tacit admission of congenital idiocy. After all, isn’t it just that flood that made me a person when I was haut comme trois pommes?
Even if, after all, neither she nor I can shake the feeling that the grunt, sweat, stare, effort, crawling, grabbing, stumbling, holding, walking, regard and coo that become a burble that becomes a brook that becomes a stream that becomes the splash and whizz-bang is the becoming that a person really is? And, even if after all, neither she nor I can shake the feeling that an explanation makes a person peu de chose, “not much”.
It was time for the performance
I shrugged and spread my hands and told her – she had told me her name but I’ve forgotten it – what a pleasure it was to meet her. Also what a remarkable encounter that prodigious boy of hers is. And it was a pleasure and wonderful too.
We shook hands.
I went in to the theater.
When I came out – I think the performance was in the theater space called the “Aquarium” – prodigious boys and puzzled mothers, picnickers, dads and kids had been swallowed by the end of day, just as my memory of what show I had been to see has been swallowed by the encounter with Hans im Glück and the mother of prodigy.
And it came to me again that I surely don’t know what can explain anything or even if anything does explain anything.
My perplexed red-crest raven friend is right in every point and especially this: putting aside cooking, indoor plumbing and successfully waging war, a solid background in magic is better preparation for living life than physics or, even, astronomy.
And it occurred to me all of a sudden: Why not make this the starting point of performance and performers beyond words?
Aussitôt dit, aussitôt fait and abracadabra: Paris Performance Calendar will highlight the performances and performers who have passed through the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson through 2019 and beyond.
Comments