Little kids to the left of me, little kids to the right of me, little kids in front of me. In the unusual heat and humidity, Phia Ménard’s dressed in a heavy overcoat, wool cap and boots to my tee-shirt, cotton pants and practically new deck shoes. She’s fooling with a plastic sack. Not five minutes into her performance L'Après-midi d'un foehn Version 1, I am still as a mouse. Enchanted, just like the little kids.
Choreographer and performer Phia Ménard’s Après-midi Version 1 (the one made for kids – when I asked my friend Wang what the adult version was like, he took an ominous air and said, “Darker.”) was part of the Lafayette Anticipations’ annual Echelle Humaine dance performance program, billed in 2024 as a celebration of “artists and works at the frontiers of the imaginary and the real, of the tangible and intangible” … including, along with Phia Ménard’s and other performances, Delila Belaza’s Figures, testing out the possibility of a “universal rite” and Catol Teixeira’s La Peau entre les doigts (“The skin between the fingers”), dancing “an imaginary traditional dance sans origine ni territoirelinking the present to eternity”. I have to love it.
It came to me that Phia Ménard, whom I’ve seen more than once before with pleasure, is a “faiseur” – a “maker”. The French word has for me a connotation of magic without illusion, action that plucks an unnoticed reality out of ambient potential. So, ‘though there’s really nothing to choose between a magus and cheap jack magician, Phia Ménard is to me the former, not the latter.
In way of a doing successful performance, Ménard’s magus raised in me an un-remembered memory.
I have come into the dusty square of a tiny town in the woods. Scrunched against a pile of kindling is rabbi Ber, a barrel of a hirsute man. He’s amusing a little jumble of scrawny brats. With each lazy snap of big man’s thick finger against the belly of his thumb, a grey dove flicks, surprised then frantically flapping, into the bright air.
The kids ignore the doves.
Instead, as they would a map, they study the rabbi’s face. They know it’s a squint of mind, not magic, that makes miracles, so they study his smirk and squint. They want to find their way from there to the peculiar regard that lets the good Ber see doves on a roost where they now see only empty air. They want only to snap their fingers for unseen things to come to be.
That’s why “faiseur” came to mind: Phia Ménard has just rabbi Ber’s peculiar regard. I am following it as, kneeling at the top of a circle of floor fans, she pulls a pair of scissors from inside her coat, and slowly, carefully, cuts a pattern of a dolly in a little plastic bag. She slips the scissors back in her coat, and taking the whole room in her regard, rises and walks slowly around behind the fans, turning them all on, seeming to exercise great care.
When the final fan is running, she sits back in her place and patiently watches the plastic bag take shape and live, first in the music – L’Aprés midi d’un foehn does reference Débussy’s breathy prelude involving a faun – then with the vitalized air. It’s an old trick, but in her regard it’s all new. She grows a crowd, who, it seems, solo, couples, trios, a ballet, take their cues the ones from the others, twirling and diving…
And they tire. Some drop out, looking for the bar, perhaps, or seeking a tryst. Then more and more begin to go, fall to the ground. And when its just the right number, just as the true god would, Phia Ménard’s regard reaches out her hands to tear them to shreds.
We know it’s all not true and none of us, kids or adults, has suspended belief, been hypnotized or tricked. We’ve just joined her regard for a bit. And we like it.
Now everybody knows Phia Ménard’s secret.
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