Last Saturday was the last day of June Events 2024 dance performance festival at Atelier de Paris, at the Cartoucherie arts center in the Bois de Vincennes.
I came early to experience Françoise Tartinville’s Vibrations Cosmiques, performed by Paris and suburban conservatory dance students and amateurs meant, according to the choreographer’s note, “to highlight the infinitely grand and infinitely small invisible links that hold us all together…”.
Also, I came because of a previous experience: for my money one of the best and most successful performances of the festival was Opéra du Villageois by Zora Snake. Sacred act, dance, opera and agitprop wrapped into one Opéra is a tour de force by artists who know their business.
In the contrasts of bright sunshine and early shadows of evening on the Cartoucherie’s rough lawn, the snaking, dissolving and resolving of Tartinville’s Vibrations’ dance forms charmed me. The spirit of it came through my ear – not usual for me – with a soundtrack that begins with Hair’s “Ain’t got no”:
Ain't got no home (So)/Ain't got no shoes (Poor)/Ain't got no money (Honey)…
and ends with its “I got life”:
I got my tongue/Got my chin/Got my neck/Got my tits…
Put aside that the two songs brilliantly echo New Age references such as Lao Zi, Buddha, Jesus, Thoreau and/or Walt Whitman, among others, and that the 1967 musical references every item on today’s socio-cultural issue list as well as all the issues named in the June Events 2024 festival note, Hair was the first live dance performance I ever saw. A Revelation. And between “Ain’t got” and “Got”, the soundtrack featured artists and styles that seem to me to straddle every year from Revelation to the present moment. Among other rappers, I thought, figured 50 Cent and Notorious B.I.G.(?). The fuckingmotherfuckingcocksuckingdesperation of the former calls up my army days and the painful discovery of my angry son as teen-man, the latter, the much later death of a favorite brother in the New Mexico desert.
Taken together, my experience of Vibrations Cosmiques shows pretty clearly at least four reasons why I believe Dance is the primal art: it operates in the flow of visible and invisible space, in the present moment and in the past, belongs to everybody and is totally and ineffably intimate.
Tartinville’s piece, which was outdoors and free, and two other equally distinctive dance performances capped the festival, recalling in form and substance the range and depth of three intense weeks of dance performance. At 7.30 pm, in the intimate Atelier de Paris auditorium, Dona Lourdès, a solo by Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma, a moving conférence dansée (“danced learning”) around the story of the woman who played Mira in the 60s film Black Orpheus as seen by herself, now a grandmother and interpreted by her grandson. At 9 pm, in the large Aquarium auditorium nearby, was Ayelen Parolin’s Zonder, a hilarious three-person physical comedy cum dance movement deconstruction.
Anne Sauvage, director of the Atelier de Paris, who put together the June Events 2024 program, is quoted as having put together a “resolutely xénophile and inclusive” program that “runs the gamut of creative diversity” to reflect deeply on, among other topics, social and culture racialization, post- and neo-colonialism and intergenerational transmission in a context of culture tension, war and climate change. And this with artists from three continents.
With its free workshops and participative and professional initiatives in and around the community and more than 20 dance performances, June Events 2024 has above all created a living handbook on how to do dance performance (or movement art) as “art engagé” for today.
At sight, I messily divide the June Events 2024 Handbook into two categories of dance experience: “On Ballet for Today” and “On the Logistics of Movement”.
By “On Ballet”, I mean dance performance focused on using a sustained form of sense (coding) to bring spectators along – like classic ballet once did. As “form of sense” or coding, I am thinking hip hop and TV tropes (See BAP/Beyond Words: J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie : Straining every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia). In a certain way, I think, Ballet-type pieces can be understood as a type of contemplation.
By “On Logistics”, I mean work focused on the regulation of the flow of movement within a performance and toward its destination. In other words, a piece strikes me most strongly for its originality, for how it happens and allows a spectator to become a participant in its sensibility.
About five performances straddle both categorizations – they “made me” watch them and struck me by how they happened.
Over the next couple of weeks, as I prepare my Real Presence, Exorcism of Putin and Call for Normal Life (BAP/Beyond Words, 26 June 2024) my stern poèsie de geste aimed to send World-wide Armed Reaction REELING BACK to the grisly Shadows from which they have Emerged, I’ll be writing about certain of these examples of [a movement] art engagé: how some may be ballets for today and others, models of flow, sensibility and Imagination models of making dance performance happen.
Beyond the Handbook, though, as far as I’m concerned, June Events 2024 proved above all and beyond all reasonable doubt that physical proximity, artistic professionalism and clear-eyed intelligence in dance performance are a path – maybe the only path – to get beyond words and get toward the (re-)Imagination of the world we now so urgently need.
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Performance thumbnails
I was not able to experience all the performances at June Events 2024. What follows is a quick take on those I was able to. I plan expanded reviews for certain more exemplary pieces later on.
On Ballet: Dona Lourdès and Zonder, which I’ve already mentioned, but also Vania Vaneau’s gorgeous Heliosfera, which managed to show this spectator and his companion an electromagnetic wave, saving us a possible costly trip to the Large Hadron Collider in wildly expensive Geneva, Switzerland; Alexandra 'Spicey' Landé’s La Probabilité du Néant (“The Probability of Nothingness”), which I immediately dubbed “Elmo Swan Lake” after the famously abrupt Muppet, truly, perhaps, the Beggar’s Opera of late capitalism; Arthur Perole’s Tendre Carcasse, dance as theater performance, which explores the symbolization of the body; Idio Chichava’s Vagabundus, an African chorus, shards of voodoo, politics and poverty revolving around human vibration...
On Logistics: Aliféyini Mohamed’s Shido, a solo that gets in the skin of autism; Pierre Pontvianne’s Jimmy, capturing the emotional truth of a body; Sonya Lindfors’ Something like this, anatomizing hip hop as a code for life; Myriam Soulanges’ and Marlène Myrtil’s performance dance Tropique du képone, using dance to attitudinize a political story…
Straddling: Clara Furey’s Unarmoured uses actual sexual rather than symbolic movement to represent itself: fucking as romance instead of romance suggesting fucking, a Sex Ballet, if you will; Marie Orts’, Talia de Vries’ and Roméo Agid’s, Contre-forme mixes athletic form and gesture along with player and spectator attitude and emotions to build a lovely dance tableau; Zora Snake’s absolutely brilliant Opéra du Villageois, political theater, spiritual experience and wonderful dance; and Soa Ratsifandrihana’s Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (“Comparison, Transmission and Rivality”), hilariously flawless social analysis of immigration and social integration and a very seriously constructed dance performance happening.
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