As the days go by on pretty much the same dull plan, an exile, as is well known, may get le bourdon, “the bumblebee” or “dull vibes”: up, coffee, listen to the bad news and lies from home, wait for noon, petit blanc, shot at six, carafes of piquet for the rest of the evening, especially if politics comes up.
An exile already with or expecting le bourdon would do well to search out all-round performer choreographer Aina Alègre – I’ve written about her here as a first order energy weaver fitter and genre-breaker: Fitting the right energies instead of matching genres may not be an act of love and resistance but it works well.
Start with her 45-minute solo R-A-U-X-A to get the blood up and moving. As Ry Cooder put it: Folks, it’s a sight! Alègre grabs a body up and shows them how human movement works within the material world - light, sound and things - to create rhythm, dance and place. To use genre to get at the experience: the difference between Alègre’s dance and, say, the Flamenco gestural from which she picks the most power-infused movement, is that Alègre’s tradition is herself and that she is the movement that animates the world around, not the instrument that plays out an esthetic.
At all times, as her R-A-U-X-A solo shows, Aina Alègre’s creativeness is a universal antidote to the saddening buzz of exile’s existential bagpipe, but her Reverberations 8, because analytical, just one phrase of a series of in-situ performances called ÉTUDES (built around the movements, gestures, dances, figures and narratives associated to tapping or hammering), seems specially designed as therapy for it.
The word “réverbération” points both glimmering light and echo of sound.
Reverberations - Etude 8 takes place, with two exceptions, in silence or, better, in Silence, where all sound comes from. No sound track. No talking. As a set, it is, left-toward center, a handsome full set of drums and full right to center, a projection of meditations or strictures or pensées on a bright-white parking garage breeze-block back wall … – Enter, from far left space, Maenad-like – … setting out, on a repeating loop of commentary and anecdote, Aina Alègre’s ontolo-graphy as a drummer drumming-drum.
The drum set features a clicking metronome clipped to the cymbal stand, which just does not compass Aina Alègre’s moving, moving, moving inner energy, which opens, sustains and closes the show.
As I switch my eyes between her energy dance and the ontolography scrolling on the wall, her ontolography speaks of an early fascination with drums… She was born in 1986… Drums as a thing to hide behind and drumming as a thing to put her in contact with the world… In 1992 she was drumming for a band called Gambas, of coming to drumming through an act of will… It is not beating of the drum that creates sound and rhythm but the nimbleness of the energy flow beating it; women with ears, hear … And more that gets beyond me…
When she – Finally! About half-way through the performance – briefly starts rhythming one of two toms mounted on the kick drum – all of a few minutes – the metronome has disappeared, is notably absent. She riffs with sticks that start with clicks which turns rapidly into drumming, personal verve and then to simple, resonant, pure sense. Later on, she taps the snare. I think then she’s not drumming: she’s looking for the glimmer and echo of her movement on the drum.
I forget how Reverberations 8 ends.
As people were leaving I was sitting looking at the stage hearing the echo of Alègre’s words and I heard many praise her drumming skill. We’d all been enchanted.
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I saw “Réverbérations - Etude 8” on 8 November at Ménagerie du Verre, which continues strong after the death of Marie Thérèse Allier, its founder and proprietor, on smaller productions of contemporary dance performance. See Beyond Words: “Marie-Thérèse Allier, literary talk, dance-performance criticism” and “Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise queerly”. I most recently saw “R-A-U-X-A” on 13 November 2024 at Carreau du Temple in the Marais. “R-A-U-X-A” wears very well.
“R-A-U-X-A” places & dates, 2025
29 March 2025 – Conde Duque, Madrid, Espagne
22, 23 & 24 May 2025 - Chaillot – Théâtre national de la danse, Paris, France
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