A couple of years back I wrote about the challenge of art performance – Deploying original intentions and creative potential – at Lafayette Anticipations, the well-known visual and performance art venue in Paris’ Marais district.
All Lafayette’s installations and performances happen within what is, essentially, an elaborate sculpture of space by architect Rem Koolhaas. Basically, Lafayette is a large three-layer light well with viewing platforms.
If you’ve lived in a flatiron or a round building or had to renovate “atypical space” to live in, experience or instinct gives you some measure of Lafayette’s ongoing technical and esthetic challenge, interesting in itself. More broadly, whether doing dance performance or living life, the space it takes place in is a primordial feature of it; we are in an existential exchange with our surroundings.
A space can be mute: choreography that works fine in somebody’s basement won’t necessarily work at Opéra Bastille. A space can talk back: current life choreographies are transforming the natural environment from an indifferent ally into an existential threat.
Mute or responsive, exchange with space is an existential imposition. But both authentic living and art require will and intention, so finding a way to dialogue, deliberately shaping and grafting intentions into given space, is essential to creative success. Because Lafayette’s “space sculpture” has so much relentless will and intention built into it – Rem Koolhaas is always talking back – it forces a spectator – at least, it has always forced me – to think hard about how a creator/choreographer/performer achieves dialogue from exchange.
So far, whether for installations or performance, Lafayette’s three-layer light well sculpture has been made to work pretty well. For instance, both as experience and brain-teaser, the articulation of light and dark for Agnes Gryczkowska’s Spring 2023 installation, Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual, did the trick very well. And the space positively threw itself into its role as a big city pocket park for performance creator Lina Lapelyte’s The Mutes.
Strong choreographers at Lafayette can and do create dialogue through force of artistic intention. I’m thinking of Noé Soulier’s Mouvement sur Mouvement. Strong performers can and do master the space with a performance that creates a parallel space, resonating like an opera in a rocket ship. I’m thinking of Dorothée Munyaneza’s A cappella. Both performances featured in Echelle Humaine 2022.
At moments, too, Lafayette’s space can make for wonderful, one-of-a-kind success. My heart still beats hard when I think of watching dance performer Yuika Hashimoto’s re-creation of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic Violin Phase, which was followed by the choreographer’s de-creation of same at the bottom of that light well. Unforgettable stuff and only possible inside Koolhaas’ sculpture.
Essentially, Echelle Humaine 2023, which opens this Friday, 15 September, is challenging all its dance performance and installation creators to work deliberately within its unique performance space. Using public workshops, creator meet & greets, installations and choreographies, it has explicitly built its program around how that is, or can be, done.
The program is heavy on visualness and concepts. Installations include Alix Boillot’s Scénographie potentielle, a blue potato that inhabits it’s given space at the top of the light well and Tai Shani’s Reading room, which accents (her) recurring motifs. Ivan Cheng’s Clarities, is a purpose-built active installation-performance using video to satirize the creative process, Luara Raio’s Apocalypso, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia, and Paul Maheke’s L'Origine de la mort, featuring Alyssa "Ledet" Dillard, are both dance-performance duets, the former themed around cultural colonization and the latter around on the thinness of the lines between perceptions.
So let’s see how the challenge is met.
Comments