Paris Dance Performance: November - December 2019
In November and December, Lady Felice Millefeuille-Bonté, the trillionaire débutante, will, I know, be trying to find me again to give me that check for a substantial sum. So, if one of her aides de camp reads the Paris Performance Calendar between serving her cream tea, Lady Millefeuille should know, right off the bat, that the Kalypso Festival 2019, France hip hop’s annual wave to the world, with 40 performances and 52 companies on show over 22 venues in Paris and the region, starts up in the first full week of November. Tell her I have plans for that.
Also, she should know that I’ll be closely following Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’Automne program. Regard du Cygne, directed by Amy Swanson, a devotee of the divine Isadora Duncan, is a Paris where-to-go for new-creator dance performance.
Over the past seven years, the Kalypso festival, a brainchild of the popular choreographer and inclusive culture warhorse Mourad Merzouki, has been promoting hip hop to dance-lovers from every horizon. I am listing four pieces. Two, Et Maintenant and Blow are new creations touching on gender issues by millennial choreographers Léa Latour and Karim Khouader, and a third, Queen Blood, a masterful demonstration of feminine performance by the celebrated choreographer Ousmane Sy (a.k.a. Babson) and his cie Paradox Sal. The fourth is a piece by the well-known “fusion” choreographer Amala Dianor, The Falling Stardust. All four touch on our times from a cultured but “non-elite” perspective that I think gives a sense of the depth and seriousness of the work being done by performers who use hip-hop as their launch point. The venues are easy access for short-term stayers.
Thoughtfulness is not the exclusive domain of hip-hop. There’s, too, Jann Gallois’ première of her new piece, Samsara, “cycle of being”, at the Palais de Chaillot running into mid-November.
I will also be attending double-header performances at the Théâtre de la Bastille. The bit I'm looking most forward to is Loïc Touze’s “Form Simple”, made up of Elucidations, a danced seminar, and the Goldberg Variations. Elucidations requires a good command of French for full enjoyment, but I think Touzé’s dramatic body elegance even so puts the seminar beyond the harm of words, especially as it is accompanied by Variations, well-spun around Bach’s piece. The Bastille program also includes Daniel Linehan’s Body of Work. Judging by the rest, this autobiographical solo piece is likely nothing less than strong, well-thought-through performance.
Finally, ‘though the laws of probability dictate that Lady Millefeuille will call just as my phone goes off line, I’ll be going to see Yvana at “T.E.C.”, the Théâtre Elizabeth Czerzuk.
This intriguing theater, or should I call it “theater experience”, has a way with theater that makes it an exception to my rule about the allowable proportion of words to kisses in my life.
Czerzuk has made T.E.C. a stage and her set a theater, and, as the world’s a stage, so a spectator is physically and psychically implicated from beginning to end. So, while Yvana is based on Witold Gombrowicz’s Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, and deals with human programming and understanding the back and forth might very well enhance your experience or even enlighten you, the way Czerzuk does theater performance means it is not strictly necessary.
At T.E.C, my cultural conventions are subtly disrupted by input from an exotic East. Czerzuk comes from Poland, and while I expect that Poland-culture theater has its specificities, for me, T.E.C. represents access to a culture zone whose familiar unfamiliarity makes it exotic. I see in Czerzuk’s productions the lineaments of the hands-on absurdity of Good Soldier Schweik, say, or the arch humor of Kafka’s Hunger Artist or the inspired-depressiveness of Otto Dix or the naively enlightened psychic stretching of Georg Buchner. It’s a pleasant change.
After the winter holidays, into Spring 2020, there’s good reason to look forward to the contemporary dance performance offer, though, too, it might mean missing Lady Millefeuille again.
Faits d’Hiver, which featured such under-represented artists as Catherine Diverres and Sylvère Lamotte in its 2019 program, will be putting forward choreographers such as Cindy van Acker and Camille Mutel, quality artisans of contemporary dance-performance. The renewed dance program at the Théâtre de la Bastille and the seat-of-the-pants programming at La Scala Paris, without forgetting the eclectic and culturally informative Printemps de la danse arabe 2020 (16 March to 20 June) will also be part of my mix in winter-spring 2020. La Scala can unexpectedly add really exceptional acts such as Machine de Cirque. And, last year, Danse arabe managed to offer conceptual hip hop and Swan Lake (in underpants). It is bound to agreeably surprise again in 2020.
In early spring 2020 Bastille will flesh out its dance offer, featuring such proven young talent (often developed at the Atelier de Paris) as Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz, Olivia Grandville or Madeleine Fournier between performances by such proven dance-performance intelligences as Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard. Finally, La Scala Paris has programmed, notably, some 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 Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco Van Dormael’s absolutely brilliant Cold Blood (Collectif Kiss & Cry).
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