“Midi sans paupière” by Carole Quettier, Bien Fait! 2019©Charlene Yves
Lady Felice Millefeuille-Bonté, the trillionaire who’s been trying these many years to reward my good looks with a hefty check and a friendly little squeeze of the hand, seems yet again to have missed me in September and October.
Then again, so absorbed was I in Jérôme Bel’s wonderful Isadora Duncan – featured by the Festival d’Automne, danced by Elizabeth Schwartz, at Centre Pompidou. Or maybe she called during the Ballet de Lorraine’s fine Histoire sans histoire(s) – a good deal more than a Merce Cunningham tribute, by the way, choreographed and arranged by Thomas Caley and Petter Jacobsson at the Palais de Chaillot … I actually shut my phone off for Machine de Cirque’s entirely different acrobat act at La Scala Paris. I may have missed her in the excitement.
Just my luck, my Lady might also have been telephoning me while I was tapping up my notes about the slew of dance performance pieces at Micadanse’s Bien Fait! 2019 festival. Had she been making her bountiful calls in mid-September, then dance performances such as Carole Quettier’s Midi sans paupière, Aurélie Berland’s short Études wigmaniennes or Gaël Sesboüé’s Maintenant, oui would have had me too focused to hear them: stock still, hands-on-knees, sage comme une image, as good as a picture, totally focused as we say now.
Money is everything, of course, even, maybe, especially, for these excellent performers.
But I regret nothing. I never have.
Quettier’s Midi sans paupière, (based on a reading of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne), is a 30-minute demonstration of an exquisite mastery of dancing narrative. She deserved every one of her six ovations. Maintenant, oui, a true Dark Waltz, constructed around group synchrony, shone like a thousand suns, though a hair too recondite to get the strong audience recognition afforded Quettier’s Midi. Aurélie Berland’s Études wigmaniennes, part of a WIP she’s calling Les Statues meurent aussi (from filmmaker Chris Marker’s “Statues also die”), is lively and forceful. It leaves you convinced that human movement created music and that’s all ye need to know.
Of course, I could have missed Lady Millefeuille’s call also during a visit to the Mobilier National, where I got to test out touch-thread Jacquard weave technology. This innovation is the fruit of a partnership of Google and Mobilier, the successful, centuries-old, state-managed administration that runs the famous Gobelin weaving operations. Or, indeed, I may have been marveling at the truly panoramic vision of French contemporary art on show at the Palais de Tokyo (Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris)… Or doing some thought dancing on art history at the Musée Maillol … or, at Musée Marmottan Monet, reflecting on how classical notions of esthetics persist.
I may miss Lady Millefeuille again in November and December.
Unless of course she decides to join me.
