Maud Blandel’s dance performance L’Oeil nu (“The Naked Eye”) is a brilliant piece of choreographic flow, sensibility and Imagination, creating a special place of sight, sound, emotion, sense and personal meaning.
L’Oeil nu is a case study in how space is shaped into place through set and how that shaping determines how performance (i.e., performers with spectators) will generate sense. I discussed this topic in an earlier post on Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains, Magic movements, body and space. Like L’Oeil nu, Aux Lointains was a feature of Swiss Dance Week, which took place from 21 to 28 November 2024.
L’Oeil nu set is a fairly narrow rectangle with the entry on one end, where I’ve come in, a long open space between spectator chairs set in five rows on each of its two long sides and, on the far end, a reel-to-reel tape recorder in front of an open wall. The set is narrow enough to ensure that no spectator can get a vision of the whole. Performers are already there, spread along, rather than formed into, a performance center, always in some way nearer or farther from some spectators. It seems they are playing at the supremely ordinary picnic game of bowls.
I’m a bit late coming in. I am hurrying along, sensitivity a bit heightened. In contrast to the spectator nearest the door and partially in common with 99% of the others, in order to find my place as a partial observer, I have to walk along the set as more or less “observable, observed, observing” by spectators and performers alike. The thirty seconds or less realtime involved here is three minutes felt time.
Rather than complement a performance that is essentially posture and interaction as at an elegant picnic – players playing: solo/solos/Individual/individuals, duo/duos/couple/couples, trio/trios/triangulars, small groups – light, sound and sense intrude into L’Oeil nu as agents of chaos or order rather than chaotic or orderly elements. Lighting is more like moon or star or sun light, stolidly there because it is there. The reel-to-reel recorder plays an audio loop of the zany, noisy, pointless aggressiveness of the old Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. The loop thrashes in the air, builds and builds and rebuilds on itself, uncovering and evolving its possibilities, is an event within the performance happening.
T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is projected in bilingual edition text, nearer me, on the farther wall. Since a spectator must turn their head far left just to see a bilingual format and un-focus from the performance to make some sense of what it says, identification and sense are made in follow-up mode: Aha! Multifoliate rose ... We grope together/Between the desire And the spasm… The Hollow Man! Men. Hollow Men. This is the way the world ends. That must be it. Mistah Kurtz-he dead/A penny for the Old Guy”/ / Remember us-if at all-not as lost/In death's dream kingdomThis is cactus land/As the perpetual star.
And all this, as best as I can describe it, I think shows just exactly the sensibility that Maud Blandel intended, associating the experience of the death of her father with “astrophysical phenomena…”, with “rotation, gravity and periodicity [and entropy]”. In the experience of L’Oeil nu, I do possess the experience of that death or death like it in the place where her piece takes me. There, I feel its entire relativity, its inexpressible inevitability, normality, theanchorless happening – of a star, a person, a group – that seems always suddenly to collapse into its own significance(s), to become a hole dragging the dark and the light into it.
Before seeing L’Oeil nu, I had been listening to the New Yorker writer Derek Thompson and practitioner and academic Adam Mastroianni discuss the replication crisis in experimental psychology. After Blandel’s piece, brooding in understanding beyond words, I conclude once again that the ineffable gossamer of human experience for the time being makes scientifically valid experimental psychology mostly impossible. Even if only because it’s impossible to cheat on it, we are all better off with dance performance than experimental psychology.
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I saw Maud Blandel’s “L’Oeil nu” 28 November at Theatre public de Montreuil, sponsored by Swiss Dance Week 2024, directed by Maud Blandel and performed by Bilal El Had, Karine Dahouindji, Maya Masse, Tilouna Morel, Oscar M. Damianaki, Romane Peytavin, sound by Flavio Virzì, Denis Rollet and Maud Blandel, lighting by Daniel Demont and Florian Bach. “L’Oeil nu” performance was a feature of Swiss Dance Week Paris, 2024, and included dance performance by Ruth Childs, Tabea Martin, Tiran Willemse and Nina Berclaz, as well as by Aurélien Dougé and Maud Blandel from 21 - 28 November 2024.
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