Before the lock downs of the past year and more, I liked participating in Micadanses-inspired performances. I say “participating” because the pieces usually presented work all along the line as what I call a happening-feeling-encountering that gets a body participating in the act of Imagination.
Imagination’s what the art of movement fosters chez the human and that’s why, as Mr. Darcy justly observes, every savage can dance. If we humans had a mite more Imagination to hand, we wouldn’t still be living in a civilization based on fire-powered wheeled carts.
Also, there may be other factors.
The Micadanses establishment is near Le Louis Philippe – named for the last “King of the French”, a weirdly nostalgic revolutionary notion – a restaurant which now charms me with its un-plumbable air of the 60s, introduced to me by Karine, my significante, who went to school nearby. Why, one expects a couple of existentialists to roll up front of the place in a tin-pot 2-chevaux.
Karine says Le Louis Philippe has been its current, somehow cramped, self since she was just another snotty 16-year old. She means that in 50 years there has been no essential alteration to the place or the ambiance breathed through its marble-iron-glass sun-porch style w/ narrow garden half-heartedly plumped up by ornamental bushes deftly strangled up in chicken wire and basted in the ceaseless traffic noise from the quay. That’s why she brought me there in the first place, Karine says: she can be 16, 66, snotty and together with me, with room for her memories, too.
Anyhow, since the pandemic, I’ve come to have a warm, even homey, feeling about the Micadanses studios which, from the exterior, are just another boxy, austere faux-what style public building. Also it’s just down the street from the Shoah memorial, overcrowded with sadnesses big and little.
I broke out in accrued homey feeling last February, when Valentine Nagata-Ramos invited me there for a “WIP” performance of her Be.Girls piece.The invite brought about a change of mental paradigm which the new feeling about Micadanses may have used to slide into my psycho-affective construct.
In the Februarys of the childhood experiences which make my paradigm, the folks used to yank us kids out of school for a spell of rough and chilly camping on Cape Hatteras. Big and small, we’d just disappear from school. Puff!, as gone as if beamed up by aliens, then reappear some weeks later, Poof!, beamed down in mid-stride, as it were.
My folks knew the true secret to doing as you please, thank you. Do it and shut up. As “Ma” – my mother figure – made us understand, this private school vacation caper was so she and “Dad” – my father symbol – could assure themselves that the world hadn’t really frozen into a hard, grey blob. On Hatteras, there were at least roiling clouds and boiling sea, like on Jupiter, which is their home planet.
By contrast to my previous paradigm experience, then, the near-evening of Nagata-Ramos’ performance was not just cold and intolerably grey, it was flattened and empty, as if life had left off business for lack of interest. Circulez! Nothing to see here!
But Karine and I felt no urge to move on and we were feeling so grateful for the invitation, so happy to get out of the apartment, and quite sure we could escape from the flattenedness of that moment in that place …
And so we did escape.
Inside the faux-what architecture of Micadanses, near the Shoah memorial, near a place where we were 16 and 66, we were able to be with for the first time in months. Believe me, I’ve rarely felt human touch so truly as when uncomfortably cuddled up there among a heteroclite bunch of adults and children in the warm and, apparently, subterranean and clearly ambiguous “May B” auditorium.
Then, as we lay there in the dark, Nagata-Ramos’ new break-dance troupe surprised our hearts, opened us up on the subtle and elegant originality that structures the young choreographer’s very contemporary au féminin break dance.
Call me Dorothy, though.
When all is said and done, the elements of my stronger affection for Micadances, like the ruby slippers, were there all along. It’s not place or paradigm shift, nor gratitude to and fondness for past and particular performance that has led me – us or anyone else – to new or deeper sentiments for Micadanses or anything else.
As pretty much stated at the beginning of this essay, what does the trick is Micadanses’ consistency in hosting and presenting really very diverse ranges of work that, like Be.Girls, generate surprise in the heart – the sudden sensibility to a subtle and elegant originality – and through that, a way to Imagination.
Micadanses’ annual Bien Fait! (“Well done!”) program of new creation is a manifest example of this… What? … This capacity for ex pluribus surprisus unum.
The program is made up of the work that creators have at hand at the end of a residence, whether finished or not.
According to Micadanses director Christophe Martin, invitations to present for the program are based on the “feeling” the work generates. I am guessing that “feeling” means that a performance manages to produce the surprise that associates to the subtle and elegant originality I was brought to see in Nagata-Ramos’ Be.Girls on that February evening.
And whether Martin means this or something else, I rush to say, we do need a critical language that explains spectator experience as well as creator intention. I’m not alone to think so, either.
However it may be, mainly in its May B auditorium (but sometimes hosted in other venues in and around town) – for instance, Théâtre de Châtillon in the petite couronne suburb of Châtillon or at Regard du Cygne in the Belleville neighborhood – Bien Fait! offers two weeks or so of diverse dance-performance and performance-dance from mid- to the end of September. And, as a general thing, the diversity of the offer has the knack letting a spectator get to where Imagination is.
This year’s Bien Fait ! opened in the Micadanses courtyard with François Lamargot’s exceptionally finished hip-hop company moving forward on his, Lamargot’s, unfinished hip hop-inspired contemporary piece, Pulse.
The spirit of Pulse made me think also of the sense behind Carly Simon’s tune Attitude Dancing: you make ‘em, you use ‘em, they belong to you. Pulse trades “attitude” for “emotion” and says “you are ‘em.”
Lamargot focuses choreographically on emotion until the spectator is surprised to understand that emotion is body and body is motion – which might, later, at Le Louis Philippe, lead one to imagine that the emotion-body relationship might just be a body-motion or motion-body or ... Garçon!
Lamargot’s quantum hip-hop, if that’s what it is, is followed seamlessly by Erika Zueneli’s contemporary-style performance Para bellum (“Prepare for war”) – I must say, a fantastic erotic creation!
Zueneli’s choreography manages to suggest to me not just the generally-supposed “link” between violence and the erotic but also surprises me into remembering that these separate but joined identities are for me impossible to parse, maybe never have been parsed, maybe have just been dictated by Saint Augustine fifteen-hundred years ago. So, if “violence” and “erotic” are just different words for the same thing, does that say that weird nostalgia, à la weirdly nostalgic “King of the French”, might be in among our most revolutionary demands? … Anyhow, something wonderfully confusing is surely in it.
This is how the Bien Fait! program goes: surprise after surprise pushing apart the joining seams on some elegant turn-turn-about of reality from creators as contextually and creatively different among themselves as Zueneli and Lamargot.
Among the pieces I was able to see this year: Mathilde Rance doing her Ubuntu around the Luba word for identity (something like “I am belonging am”) which is also the name of the Linux operating system, manifest and accessorized with pots and pans and a strikingly photogenic costume; Laura Simi & Maurizio Ravalico doing The Loud Atlas, a danced songbook slap-sticking on the mysterious-inclined “Cloud Atlas Symphony”; Sylvère Lamotte, Tout ce fracas, performed results of a study on “corporal re-appropriation in hospital environments” – a little play about helping each other that brought tears to my eyes that is to see if you’re wondering about human difference; Julie Salgues & Myriam Gourfink, Là (“There-Here”) doing not-quite-a-Heidegger jig around the dancer’s profession … My personal favorite, though, is Lotus Eddé Khouri. Her newest creation, Believe, features a man-woman couple (Christophe Macé is the man, Eddé Khouri the woman) where muscle twitches only as called, as couple, bathed by lapping tides of Purcell’s The Cold Song, becomes duet. Doesn’t sound likely but Eddé Khouri makes it work well, exposing an ongoing and raging boil of experience from almost imperceptible movement.
So, surprise yourself with a little Imagination when you finally come back to Paris. If you came in early Fall, look for Bien Fait! If not, make sure to mark these creators down in your bucket list for when you need a little elegant originality ...
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