If you’re a trillionaire trying to reward my good looks with a hefty check, in September and October you’re likely to find me at one and the other of the dance and performance pieces in the Paris Performance Calendar, hands on knees, attentive to doings on the stage. The federative performance arts Festival d’Automne and big, or dance performance-dedicated, institutions such as the Théâtre National (Palais) de Chaillot or Micadanses always offer a good range of dance performance as a new season opens. Most, if not all of my September and October picks are taken from such 2019-2020 Season calendars.
Through to December, there’s Festival d’Automne’s celebration of Merce Cunningham’s contribution to modern dance. This makes for a prime opportunity to see France’s excellent provincial ballets strut their excellent stuff. There is an instructive bent in the offer and with it an opportunity to brush up on the principles of modern and contemporary dance as you enjoy the dancing.
My head has highlighted intriguing retrospective work by the well-known choreographers Jérôme Bel and Philippe Decouflé. Without ignoring such emotion-masters as Saburo Teshigawara performing things like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (recommended by DanseAujourdhui’s Catherine Zavodska, at the Philharmonie de Paris) or the erotic tension of Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat, my heart has chosen creation by artists whose esthetic power I admire, including Yasmine Hugonnet, Myriam Gourfink and Latifa Laâbissi or such artists as Florence Casenave, Carole Quettier or Nina Vallon, whose work I have not yet seen but whose performance ideas tease my esthetics. Vallon, along with Aurelie Berland, among others, are movement artists whose work makes up a really intriguing offer of new creation riding classical music and choreographies for Micadanse’s Bien Fait! 2019 program.
Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat and the playful exploration of Yasmine Hugonnet’s Se Sentir Vivant both feature in Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 program. This contrast of approach reminds me that Echelle Humaine is both quality live performance and a visual treatise on how movement creates or shapes physical space – and vice-versa.
Again in the spatio-human vein, the very talented saxophone-clarinet-piano guy Antonin Tri Hoang and 12 musical companions will be turning the vast volumes of Saint Eustache’s Ship-to-Heaven architecture into a jazz soundbox. The performance will also provide a good moment to explore the old Halles parish church, far more of a conscious work of art than Notre Dame and which harbors Raymond Mason’s 1971 Le départ des fruits et légumes du coeur de Paris, le 28 février 1969 (“The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris”) sculpture in a side chapel.
Looking past the September-October listing, Paris’ performance offer for November and December is easily as solid but also perhaps more esthetically intriguing than that of September-October. I’m thinking here not just of the ongoing Festival d’Automne program (lots of performance from La Ribot as well as dance from Merce Cunningham), but also Loïc Touzé, Liz Santoro and Daniel Linehan as dance performers at Théatre de la Bastille and new creations by Jann Gallois, Kader Attou and Système Castafiore at Palais de Chaillot. But really, especially I’m impatiently waiting on the program for the Kalypso hip-hop dance festival from 6 November to 17 December. In 2019, Kalypso, brainchild of performer, choreographer and tireless promoter of urban dance culture Mourad Merzouki, will feature work by 52 well-selected troupes in Paris and in cities throughout France. I’ll be paying particular attention to Kalypso and French hip hop/urban dance in 2019-2020.
Beyond hip hop and into Spring 2020, staying with just a few center city institutions, there’s reason to look forward to the contemporary dance performance offer, just for instance, at Théâtre de la Bastille or La Scala Paris or Atelier de Paris in Spring 2020. Bastille for example will be featuring such proven young talent as Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz, Olivia Grandville or Madeleine Fournier, talen developed at the Atelier de Paris. La Scala will offer, notably, new circus performance with La Chute des anges (Raphaëlle Boitel, cie L'Oublié(e)) and Humans (Yaron Lifschitz, cie Circa) along with a reprise of the Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco Van Dormael’s absolutely brilliant Cold Blood (Collectif Kiss & Cry).
Click here to access the September-October Performance Agenda.
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