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Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley leave the Ballet de Lorraine: how to say goodbye good [By Tracy Danison]

“CRWDSPCR” by Merce Cunningham, v. Jacobsson/Caley 2024. Photo © Ronan Muller, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are leaving the Ballet de Lorraine at the end of 2024, so on 6 November 2024 I went to see their swan song at the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy.

My goodbye to them is to point everybody else to their legacy in the smart and effective development of people and to develop talent. I’ve already talked about how they made of the Ballet de Lorraine an enterprise of “many in one”, rather than “one from many”. I’ve written about this in Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine and Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: a point in time, a line, the line, a period, instantly and forever. Their vision of choreographic enterprise suits the human needs of performers and prepares them for the challenge of repertories that span not only time and taste but multiple socio-cultural paradigms. As promoters of culture, Jacobsson, born in Stockholm, and Caley, born in Michigan, USA, who met in early 1990s New York and have led the Ballet de Lorraine for better than 10 years now, make no secret of their appreciation of the opportunities of an open world system as well as France’s unique system for encouraging and sustaining arts and culture. Big fans of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, as artists, they are careful to frame their work and the work of others, new and old, as part of the common evolution: Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience.

So, that’s what I think.

However, like so many others in my increasingly long life, Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley have chosen to say goodbye in their own, irrational, inexplicable, ineffable way, forcing me to go to the trouble of interpreting said “goodbye”.

First, what’s the traditional protocol for goodbye?

In antiquity, Archilochus mocks the barbarian waving the shield he (Archilochus) had left behind as he (Archilochus) decamped from a losing fight. I believe Archilochus also mentions that when he’s dead, he’ll miss eating figs. I guess that “goodbye” has always been personal about the individual.

But, contrary to what study of Archilochus might suggest, goodbye is not just about the sovereign “I” decamping or dying. It’s also about “You & I“ and “our” Separating(s). Not just what the one good-byer leaves behind but what the other good-byer keeps from the encounter. Acknowledging this truth, Italian-speakers say “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for hello and “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for goodbye: “hello-goodbye”.

 

“Fugitive archives” by Latifa Laâbissi. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

In the vein of hello-goodbye, the Venerable Bede’s Deathsong uses the Northumbrian to suggest that

Fore thaem neidfaerae ‖ naenig uuiurthit
thoncsnotturra, ‖ than him tharf sie
to ymbhycggannae ‖ aer his hiniongae
huaet his gastae ‖ godaes aeththa yflaes
aefter deothdaege ‖ doemid uueorthae.

Excuse my clunky here-belowness in perspective, but it seems to me that, in a proper hello-goodbye, nothing can beat the traditional advice to prospective brides.

We are all (helpless child) brides of our little destinies, not so? And, upon saying goodbye, the feckless maiden says hello to the knowing wife and to meet the occasion must have, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

For the first part of their hello-goodbye – Program 1 – Jacobsson and Caley chose to hand their stage to Ballet de l’Opéra - Grand Avignon for a performance of Emilio Calcagno’s D’un matin de Printemps (2022). Calcagno, whose work has been characterized as “unclassifiable”, was born in Sicily, came to study dance in France in 1989 and stayed to make good.

D’un matin de Printemps, with 14 dance performers and three musicians, uses tableau-style choreographies and the electronic sound of composer Matteo Franceschini to bring its audience into a fresh, slantendicular, connection with classic composers Ravel, Debussy, Satie and Boulanger. “I chose 19^th and 20^th French composers [for D’un matin de Printemps] because this rich, elegant and, especially, artistically free part of the contemporary period invites diversity of interpretation…. Everything in it lends itself re-interpretation: rhythm, pulse, movement, tempo…”

The second part – Program 2 –  includes CRWDSPCR by Merce Cunningham, Fugitive Archives by Latifa Laâbissi and Mesdames et Messieurs by Jacobsson and Caley.

 

“Mesdames et Messieurs” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

First conjured in 1993, CRWDSPCR – like the mechanical signaling gestures that mark the piece, the title is a nod and wink at punch-card bureaucratic “condensation” of language – is an iconic visualization of technological civilization: frenetic movement and urgent information high in color. Also, CRWDSPCR recalls Cunningham’s (and John Cage’s) revolutionary notion that choreography and music are independently intended, co-existing rather than joined, in dance performance. With a performance for the Montpellier Dance festival, CRWDSPCR became part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s repertory in July, 2024.

Both Jacobsson and Caley danced with Cunningham’s company from 1993 into the naughties.Laâbissi’s Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs were part of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s celebration of the centenary of the Ballets Suédois (in Paris). They premiered 18 May 2022 at the Opéra national de Lorraine at Nancy. Fugitive, for eight woman-only performers in checkered dresses with bell flairs and, along with a Wizard-of-Oz-Munchkin esthetic, something of the chaotic Shadoks cartoon to them – troubling, droll, grotesque and erotic. Fugitive, a performance that is almost a dance, borrows heavily from the imagery – but not the choreography – archives of the Marchand des oiseaux from Ballets Suèdois.

Mesdames et Messieurs is a reinvention of Cinésketch, a one-shot slapstick parody of “adultery comedy” created by the painter Francis Picabia and directed by writer René Clair and presented in the dying days of the Ballets Suèdois. Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley present an (almost) entirely masculine cast enjoying the game of love in a wacky and colorful Eros Triumphant.

Later, I joined them for dinner at a brasserie near the central train station called L’Excelsior, a place where the beer advertisements as well as the woodwork and stained glass are works of art. I asked how D’un matin de Printemps, CRWDSPCR, Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs represent “something new, old, borrowed and blue”.

Thomas Caley’s answer is succinct. He points out that all the pieces are doing something “new” as performed “now”, whether in concept or choreography and or as pure invention, as re-invention, or as renewal of or from something “old” and “borrowed”: concept, choreography, phrases, figures, sounds, music, décors, costumes, visuals, intentions.

Jacobsson nods agreement at this: nothing is pulled from thin air.

But the couple is flummoxed when I ask “What about something blue?”, which I have explained is, traditionally, a garter, the symbolic gateway to the erotic. So, I do it for them. I point Mesdames et Messieurs a male-male game of love that, quite accidentally and with no ill-effect on what I might have called a “homoerotic” review, can have two women in it.

Hello-goodbye.

Ballet de Lorraine: a second look and, in premier, the sweetest of chaoses [By Tracy Danison]

“Malón”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024, premier. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images

It’s just hard to overstate Ballet de Lorraine’s individual and collective ability to wrap themselves well and truly around a choreography. Linked performances of Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot, a giant pulsing and trembling tableau vivant, and Ayelen Parolin’s Malón (“Chaos Agents”), a contemplative ballet, on the summer bill at Opéra national de Lorraine, are the most recent demonstration.

Maud Le Pladec writes that for Static Shot “… The movement of images, the energy and rhythm make up a single scene that is from beginning to end at the apogee of its visual and physical intensity…”. Ayelen Parolin explains that her dance extracts the essence of opposites attract.

Essentially, Static Shot performers first do a half-hour’s desperate, sex grapple, like Ares and Aphrodite

Got me pullin’ off my gold. Got me leavin’ my jewelry on your kitchen floor… (Oh! Baby - Jessy Wilson, 2024)

Then, half an hour later, they sluice onto stage as energetic yet thoughtful Merry Pranksters,

So we sailed up to the sun/'Til we found the sea of green/And we lived beneath the waves/ In our yellow submarine (Yellow Submarine - The Beatles, 1966)

As my son used to say when he was cute and little, “Même pas fatigué, Daddy”: the Ballet come off as natives in both types of performance energy budgets.

The first time I experienced Static Shot, about two years ago, I felt it as sensual, erotic, hot. This time, the effect on me of the piece’s kaleidoscope movement (and throbbing rhythm that pushes and pushes but never quite breaks), of the physical presence of its performers, bodies trim, elegant, confident, crossing and re-crossing each other’s paths –  had me experiencing raw power, pushing desire, a display of the power of sex.

Whether the change is because practice has perfected the Ballet’s performance energy in a particular direction since I last saw the piece or because I was the first time in a different mood than today, I can’t really know but I think not.

I analyze the change like this: the first time I experienced Ballet performers as focused outside themselves, focused on the effect of the kaleidoscope movement on spectators. This second time, though, I felt them focused inside, absorbed (but not self-absorbed) in their individual movement (as a power train to the performance).

In that inside focus they fell into the physical display of power, a posture of provocation, much like the sensibility a spectator is meant to experience on seeing parading soldiers.

“Static Shot”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024. Photo © Laurent Philippe

It could be an accident. Surely, part of the power display posture is the way human DNA is folded – hard-wired threat display behaviors etched in the limbic system –  part is culture – Louis XIV founded France’s first dance academy to improve martial elegance as well as actual prowess – part is (esthetic) situation –  drum majorettes with rhinestone batons tossing and twirling the length of the football field are the same model as marines marching on order of arms with M-16s. I’ve done it myself, the power display mode is easy to get into and the closest one will ever get with a rifle to an involuntary orgasm.

But that doesn’t mean that the existence of a baked-in movement condemns a mover to a display of power posture. In dance performance, I think, posture is an artistic choice, or it can be, or it should be. Experiencing Static Shot as a power display made a difference for me as a spectator both in terms of immediate experience and in terms of the sensibility and imagination I carry away from the piece.

Becoming aware of the display changed my physical experience in the same way that “Get outta th’ fuckin’car, motherfucker” as opposed to “Please step away from your vehicle, Sir” changes subsequent physical experience with a police patrol. If, for the first performance I felt I was swaying along in some nightclub full of hot men and women, for this second, I felt “pinned down breathless” in my seat.

And then, my experience of Static Shot as a dance performance, as a vehicle to bring me into a sensibility and an un-narrative space, changed enormously. The first time I saw Static Shot, I experienced engagement in a strong, sexy group process. The second time, I felt a witness, maybe even a bit of a victim, to the power of sex.  

Finally, the double experience of Static Shot reminds me of just how much choreography, and performer interpretation of choreographic intention, shape performer energy (as opposed to performer movement) and just how much that energy affects both performer and spectator experience.

“Malón”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024, premier. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images

Specifically, focus – which is not the same type of consciousness as attentiveness or concentration – can have as transforming an effect on spectator and performer experience in choreography as focus (“prioritization”) can have on business or commercial operation.

After Static Shot, which, in case you are in doubt after all this spilled ink, I enjoyed a lot, in both iterations. After this one, I was feeling particularly relaxed and easy, feeling, you might say, while picking my gold and jewelry up off the kitchen floor, disposed to sail toward the sun.

Ayelen Parolin writes in her dance note that in Malón she was looking to use the synergies of the Ballet de Lorraine troupe members to work on the notions of “pleasure, fun and letting go on the one hand and precision and rigor on the other…” . Serendipity: relaxed and easy was very good space to be in as Malón began. It’s also the natural framework for what Parolin’s quick, leisurely and multiple-layer piece delivered for me: the ordinary mystery of bodies as they move with other bodies, charmed laughter (from spectators) at performers’ efforts to use the body to find a place, make “contacts” into relationships.

With the Ballet’s 24 members in play, Malón is all the same much like her other, smaller-cast works I’ve seen: color, costume and space shaped by individuals and small groups. As stage time passes performers differentiate and evolve within the occupied space – that is, as the space relates to the people within it.

“Static Shot”, Opéra de Lorraine, 23 May 2024. Photo © Laurent Philippe, Divergence Images

Also, there’s more than a little Charlot in Parolin’s choreographic philosophy: in Malón, that’s an overstated title, “Malón” (essentially, “Chaos agents”), and a quite understated “cross-dressing” costuming point to an underlying absurdist view of people and world. Parolin’s ironic humor and choreographic style seem to me a perfect fit for Ballet de Lorraine, which, as I keep saying, is distinguished by an emphasis on performer individuation. And, indeed, for Malón,they are a good fit.

There’s a strong element of natural unpredictability in Parolin’s piece, “natural” because a human encounter is unpredictable – I learned afterwards that she had asked performers to improvise within her larger scheme. Improvisation as well as light clowning seemed to me often evident when performers leave the stage; in real life, goodbyes tend to sum up relationships. They seem to do so here.

The figures that came into my head as I watched were from Yellow Submarine, a sort of Monty-Python style Victorian take on things: a naïve sweetness in formulating the question, in seeking and finding possibilities.

Parolin’s chaos is about falling together, not falling apart. Her “cross-dressing”, if that’s what it is, seems to me to point not so much at turning gender (and so the world) topsy-turvy as turning spectators to the wider opportunities to look good that exist: Do you have shapely legs? Try this tutu. Does wonders! In fact, the advice on wearing a tutu rather sums up the un-narrative space Malón led me to: “Try some”.

As I mentioned in my earlier article, I feel obliged to say something about identity and Parolin’s new dance performance piece. I think that if there is in it an evidence of her grappling with identity, this is it: maybe an enhanced awareness of the grapple every human has with their body or, maybe, an enhanced awareness of how important personal identity is.

Ballet de Lorraine performers

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

Static Shot

Choreography: Maud Le Pladec, with Régis Bradel/Music: Chloé and Pete Harden /Sound: Vincent Le Meur/Lighting : Eric Soyer/ Costuming: Christelle Kocher – KOCHÉ, with Laure Mahéo and assistance from École de Broderie d’Art du lycée Paul-Lapie de Lunéville, France

Malón

Choreography: Ayelen Parolin, with Julie Bougard, Jeanne Colin and Daan Jaartsveld/Dramaturgy: Olivier Hespel/Lighting: Jean-Jacques Deneumoustier/ Sound and music: Benoist Esté Bouvot/ Costuming: Alexandra Sebbag with
Costumes du CCN - Ballet de Lorraine

Click for Ballet de Lorraine in Europe, Summer 2024

Ballet de Lorraine Third Program: Ayelen Parolin’s "Malón" and Maud Le Pladec’s "Static Shot" in perspective [By Tracy Danison]

“Malón”, dance performance by Ayelen Parolin. Photo © Ballet de Lorraine

As part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s third program for the 2023-24 season, I’ll be seeing Ayelen Parolin’s newly-created Malón (“Chaos Agents”) in premiere and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot for the second time at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy.

Natural turnover and state policy, and also the quantum wash that is making us a new culture era, as everywhere else, are welling up inside and outside the Ballet de Lorraine, so it’s a good idea to try to grind up some socio-esthetic lenses before I sit down to watch.

Parolin, who came to Belgium from Argentina in 2000, has been very creative, in view and quite successful in France these past couple years. The last Parolin dance performance I reviewed – but not the only one I’ve had the pleasure to experience – was WEG, in September 2021, at Atelier de Paris, when things were opening up again from the pandemic.

“WEG”, I wrote then, “Choreographs observation, imitation, vibration, variation and novelty, letting onlookers revel in the complex subjectivity of human relationships”.

Apparently, at some point in her life, Parolin took on “she” after having previously been identified or identifying as “he”. According to my friend, Wang, who nearly had a crise de nerfs when I told him I hadn’t realized any of this or its possible implications, says that the switch plays a role in how her work is conceived and perceived and how she is received. So, I’ll be going into Malón with the choreography of  identity and the complex subjectivity of human behavior as my lenses.

I’ll also be seeing Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot through two lenses. My first focuses on the social-organizational implications of Le Pladec’s appointment and her role as a state culture actor. She is currently director of Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) - Orléans, but will become director of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, starting January 2025. Who succeeds her in her old post and the direction she sets in her new one will send signals, make waves. She’ll be, at least for a while, not just one of the three women running one of the 19 CCNs, she’ll be the only woman running one of the five big regional dance companies, which include Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin, Ballet de Marseille, Ballet Preljocaj and Malandain Ballet Biarritz, two of which bear the name of their founders and current directors.

“Static Shot”, dance performance by Maud Le Pladec. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The centrally-funded but locally operated CCN are part of the Mitterand-era effort to institutionalize nouvelle danse française initiatives such as Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain (BTC), founded by Françoise Ardet, Philppe Thiry and Jean-Albert Cartier post-1968. Grossly drawn, each CCN today represents a mix of a more or less strong choreographic personality through its director (see above) and more or less local or regional culture- artistic action by its location-and dance culture tradition.

Along with a particular attachment to music, Maud Le Pladec claims BTC heritage, which promulgates a dance practice that not only eschews classic ballet but also ballets russes avant-garde style stuff. In addition to the clearly contemporary Static Shot, one of Le Pladec’s recent, and quite successful, productions, for instance, is Silent Legacy,  built out of Krump-style break dance featuring, besides a man and woman cross-genre performers, a 10- or 11-year-old Québec girl who can stomp and emote with the best in Compton. Le Pladec’s note says that the performance is a meld of break and contemporary dance and part of her ongoing investigation of dance genre and heritage. So, if at least some of Ayelen Parolin’s artistic identity may be said to turn on gender, going forward, at least some of Le Pladec’s innovation may turn on issues of genre J.

The most important lens for appreciating dance performance is spectator experience – truth is beauty, beauty, truth, 1066 and all that – does the technique, flow and sensibility bring the spectator beyond words, toward Imagination?

Largely, Le Pladec’s work does for me, as Static Shot did the first time. I noted that “Le Pladec seems to use music as the captain of one of those treasure-hunt ships uses a deck hose to wash the mud and barnacles off a long-hidden treasure, dazzling while incentivizing the crew. Instead of gold and jewels, she focuses the senses on the fantastic movement of these Ballet de Lorraine bodies” … Her approach, I thought then, goes to the shape and form of her consciousness, dovetailing neatly in this with Loïc Touzé’s quite choreographically different No Oco, with which Static Shot shared the bill.

Later on, after the show, I felt confirmed in the conviction that her piece had let spectatators stand for a moment on the balcony of her consciousness, run a finger along the woodwork, when I read this unexpected (prose) poem in her dance note:

Enfant, je danse sur les musiques pop de la disco-mobile de mon père, je suis peinte en tutu rose sur la portière de sa camionnette, je cours de galas en compétitions de moto-cross. Mon père aime la danseuse qu’il a fait peindre sur sa camionnette et j’aime que mon père l’aime. Je ne deviendrai jamais la danseuse en tutu rose peinte sur le C35 et pourtant, c’est bien grâce à elle que je danse tel que je danse aujourd’hui. 

(“As a girl I danced to the pop music playing from my Dad’s Citroën 35 van. I was the dancer in the pink tutu he had painted on the disco-van door and was dancing with him as he went from moto-cross race to moto-cross gala. Dad loved the dancer on the door and I love that Dad loved her. I have not become that dancer. But I owe it to her that I dance as I dance today”.)

June Events 2024 dance performance festival likely to tickle critic [By Tracy Danison]

“Tonewall”, performance by Jazz Barbé, Laura Frigato and Léon. Photo © Cie Parc Thumette

The other day I ran across a film from Finland called Dogs don’t wear pants by Jukka-Pekka (J-P) Valkeapää, who has obviously not had the pleasure of seeing Parisians with their spoiled lapdogs of a chilly winter morning.

The title tickles me: “Dogs don’t wear pants”, indeed. I spent a whole evening chuckling about it. Karine and I had good laugh translating it into French. According to her, it can’t be, I am to understand, “Les Chiens ne portent pas de pantalon”, which didn’t make the beloved smirk but must be ”Un chien n’a pas de culotte”, which does. I notice that that’s the actual French title uses “pantalon”.

Thus revved up, I went to see J-P Valkeapää’s Dogs don’t next day.

“Vagabudus” performance by Idio Chichava. Photo © Mariano Silva

There are many words or phrases such as the Dogs don’t film title that just tickle me, make me merry, push me to action.

I reckon this tickling is the expression of the power poetry has over me. Poetic power runs from amusing to consoling and, beyond that, I believe to opening the doors to perception, imagination, beauty.

For instance, I ran into a David Lehman poem just now called To be a Guest on the Grace Cavilieri Show – “The Poet and the Poem”. It tickled me into reconciling with the idea that somebody might take real pleasure in the things that loom large there: banana splits and hot chocolate and watching or admiring a show called “The Poet and the Poem”, or God knows, Kierkegaard.

“Le Cabaret de la rose blanche”, performance by Radhouane El Meddeb. Photo © Agathe Poupeney

More important, well beyond the acceptance of the possibility of otherness and, if it’s not beauty, truth and imagination, then it’s something damned close, Lehman’s words tickled me into pondering my song of myself. And it’s no matter that Lehman may or may not have intended what happened or seen the possibility of it once he’d finished scribbling.

Sure, To be a Guest has literary merit – image and language that embody intention – but I don’t think its tickling power really comes from a well-made echo of the story the words eventually tell.

I believe the tickling is actually the sensation that I’ve brushed shoulders with the word maker, the person: that would be something like sharing the sensibility of writing Lehman becoming living David.

“Dona Lourdès” performance by Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma. Photo © Valeriia Shcherbina

How that sort of experience happens, I’m not sure.

I am sure, though, that it’s not the words but the happening + applied art (of words or otherwise) that bring the tickle, poetic power, with it.

Dogs don’t wear pants happens when a widower gets into relations with a professional dominatrix while waiting for his daughter to finish an appointment with a tattoo artist.

The form of words attracts my attention, like a twig breaking on the narrow, seemingly empty, forest path behind me,

Widower: (Petulantly) Why do I have to take off my pants?

Dominatrix: (With assurance) Dogs don’t wear pants.

But what happens then may or may not get me to something beyond or well beyond the words.

“Something like this”, performance by Sonya Lindfors. Photo © Tuukka Ervasti

So it is that the title “June Events”, the annual pre-summer dance performance festival at the Atelier de Paris, always tickles me. That’s through the form of words: “events” awaiting final significance –  I mean “events” such as “January 6^th”, “February 24^th”, or “Charlie Hebdo” – and the historic June Days of 1791, attract my attention:

Attraction through intention: new live work by 21 diverse dance performance creators who, as I noted last year, have moved on from developing dance or performance genres to developing an art of movement (The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words June 29, 2023: “Varieties of dance performance: trading a mess of pottage for sense and awareness”.

Attraction through the festival’s execution: physical intensity and setting – 15 sessions over 18 calendar days, mostly in the Bois de Vincennes (with the natural ambiance-potential well-exploited by Atelier production) and probably the best overall environment a dance performance fan can get for the money.

“La Probabilite du Neant”, performance by Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé. Photo © Gabriel Paquin_______

Performances and principal creators, June Events, 22 May – 8 June, 2024

Jimmy, Pierre Pontvianne; Vagabundus, Idio Chichava; Something like this, Sonya Lindfors; Heliosfera, Vania Vaneau; Cherche forêt, Ikram Benchrif and Paul Girard; Tonewall, Jazz Barbé, Laura Frigato, Thumette Léon; Shido, Lil’C; Tropique du képone, Myriam Soulanges and Marlène Myrtil; Volcelest, Capucine Dufour; Tendre Carcasse, Arthur Perole; Cabaret Brouillon, Loïc Touzé;Le Cabaret de la rose blanche, Radhouane El Meddeb; Agrimi Fauve, Lénio Kaklea; La probabilité du Néant, Spicey; Unarmoured, Clara Furey; Contre-forme, Marie Orts, Talia de Vries and Roméo Agid; L’Opéra du Villageois, Zora Snake; Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna, Soa Ratsifandrihana; Dona Lourdès, Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma; Zonder, Ayelen Parolin

Andrea Peña’s “6.58: Manifesto”: coding, synchronization and a bare body show for tomorrow [By Tracy Danison]

“6.58: Manifesto” by Andrea Peña, identity mode #1. Photo © Lian Benoit

Carreau du Temple, the renovated former rag market set in the Marais just behind République, celebrates its 10^th year next week. It has been successfully using events such as Festival Every Body, sophisticated art, culture and fitness programs to build an accessible, quality culture-slash-community center.

For dance performance, Carreau’s’s success means spectators who are varied in age, interests and cash flow: there’s a good sample of current civilization experiencing any given show – comfortably seated in a modern auditorium, too. That’s important to me because I think we’re in a changement d’époque in dance performance (and other, lesser, things, too) and being able to gauge other spectator reaction lets me check my own.

So, the other night, when Andrea Peña’s 6.58: Manifesto got four ovations, I turned to look the crowd over, see how what the glow was. After that, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one thinking they’d been witness to a new baseline for contemporary dance.

To judge by 6.58:, most of what’s to come doesn’t have to do with technology, dance technique, sound or even movement, but with how performers relate to one another, intra-identity– how individual performer identity plays out as they work through a choreography.

“6.58: Manifesto” by Andrea Peña, identity mode #2. Photo © Lian Benoit

So, for instance, if the sound of 6.58:Manifesto is some variant of techno-beat or house music or whatever, well, you have to keep in mind that repetitiveness is also what characterizes Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s movement with Steve Reich’s Violin Phase, too, and that was also at a turning point for dance performance. Sound really has been understood to be, as Merce Cunningham had it, just a tool for dance performance.

It’s about the overall effect of movement, not sound or even sound and movement. As one of the troupe told me casually, they see the measure as a “rave party” – if the choreography and performance bring players and spectators into shared sensibility, then artistically they’re doing good. And what goes for sound – and for lighting and other setting and media choices as well – goes for dance technique (or approaches or genres).

Pena’s people are as capable of (and sensitive to) a delicate flutter en pointe as of a resonant phrase out of Pina Bausch café-théâtre as of a power move right outta Compton – how they feel it, yes they CAN. And nothing to do with previous experience or training, either – “new” dance performance is about cultural osmosis, not learning: 6.58:  performers say they are strictly contemporary-trained.

And, though fit, supple and very skilled, performers have ordinary bodies – pretty much like you and me or like our kids, they are a range of people. There’s nothing of the unnaturally hardened prima ballerina or Compton street athlete in them. I saw the old warhorse Pedro Pauwels (Cygn, etc) interrogate identity through Anna Pavlova’s 1907 “Dying Swan” last winter, for the penultimate Faits d’Hiver dance festival. Given my experience of 6.58:, I’m looking forward to Andrea Peña’s interrogation of the Swan (and also, Rite of Spring). Maybe Faits d’Hiver 2025, the very last one, according to founder and director Christophe Martin, will invite them?

“6.58: Manifesto” by Andrea Peña, identity mode #3. Photo © Lian Benoit

Structurally, 6.58: Manifesto passes through three types of identity/relationship modes which I’ll call: 1.) “coding” – basic, directed and repetitive movement such as signaling or running in place; these generate an elaborate dance that ends by rolling up its own guide tapes, like GPT when the logic spins out ;  2.) “synchronization of movement” according to an elaborate choreography , something like, say, Hofesh Schecter or The Horde (Ballet de Marseille); the synchronization visualizes as kaleidoscope and tends to raise spectator emotions; 3.) “bare body show”, which functions like a break dance battle or series of battles, but are noncompetitive among involved performers; there’s no appeal to spectator judgement.

Bare body show integrated the whole performance by finishing it, recasting and highlighting the relational structures of the preceding coding and synchronization. It’s a rave party indeed: bare body show has no prime: within the collective, each dancer has a contribution and a place generated by a dynamic that is created by that contribution. Say it like this: rather than “from many, one,” 6.58:  does “with many, one”. And a better one, too.

I think it’s important to note the un-eroticism of 6.58:’s bare body show – that is, the absence of a particular erotic element that elsewhere always seems to slather itself all over a woman’s dancing body. As with sound, they seem to have been able to just assume that the bare body is a body.

So, performers and performance came off as just simply gorgeous; rich in identities, gorgeous in bodies, they took spectators somewhere rich in imagination potential. That’s the essential thing.

_____

I saw “6.58: Manifesto”, a choreography for six performers by Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Andrea Peña on 25 April 2024 at Carreau du Temple, performers are associate artists with AP&A, Peña’s troupe. “6.58: Manifesto” was AP&A’s first production in Europe. Hats off to Sandrina Martins, dance performance developer as well as director, at Carreau du Temple.

Léa Vinette’s “Nos Feux”: On consonance, shared sensibility and imaginary volcanoes [By Tracy Danison]

Léa Vinette and Ido Batash, “Nos Feux” by Léa Vinette. Photo © Simon Van Der Zande

Nos Feux (“Our Fires”) by Léa Vinette has a certain consonance with Nos Meilleures Années (La Meglio gioventù/”The Best of Times”), Marco Tullio Giordana’s 2003 classic six-hour film. Rather than rely on an underlying rationale or logic or tacit storyline, the one and the other make sense by sharing with spectators the sensibility involved in living those experiences – pointing, along the way, to the loose relativity of remembrance, which, given the data soup information loops we’re living in, also tinkles bells. Paola Cortellesi’s popular 2023 film, Il reste encore demain (C'è ancora domani/“There’s Still Tomorrow”), by the way, does the same trick as Gordana’s, also with a healthy dollop of (quality) daytime soap opera and also backed up with visual tropes and clichés that create a sort of nutritive bath of sensibility in which otherwise disparate events make sense together.

With spectators and performers all up close together and breathing the same air, Léa Vinette’s two-person performance (herself and performer-choreographer Ido Batash) Vinette has to use movement, body-to-body positioning, some warm-colored plastic tiles and sound to achieve shared sensibility. If my experience of Vinette’s piece is a gauge, there’s something of genius in how she’s made these elements work together.

The title words “nos feux” had put me in mind of love, sentiments, sentimentality, and, from all that, nostalgia – not just Giordana’s picture but also, say, of Robert Merle’s wonderful picaresque novel, En nos vertes années (“We were green then”): Tracy in Old Provence, Tracy’s musketeer adventures: all the self-romanticized story of a checkered career.

Ido Batash, “Nos Feux” by Léa Vinette. Photo © Simon Van Der Zande

I began Nos Feux as a spectator very strongly conscious that I was trying to impose my expectations on what I was seeing. Access denied, as the world-spanning CPU might put it – or Léa Vinette’s choreographic design might have made it.

Skilled movement kept pointing from the duo to the two individuals in it. Vinette seems to twitch her pelvis and, twitching, turn inward; Batash seems to turn away, seeming to reach out. They come together, touch, he holds her, she holds him, but there’s no couple drawn in it. I ended up letting go the expectation, let myself puzzle until I was absorbed and then involved in two very different individuals grappling with strong emotions. The sensibility I was enjoying by experience, I later learned from Vinette’s performance note, is “an imagined volcano and two bodies … deploying [their] boiling lava, impulse, desire, dreams, songs and visions…”.  In other words, that’s no duo, that’s how two people performing on the same volcano look, at least, when you’re watching.

____

I saw Léa Vinette’s “Nos Feux” at Etoile du nord, 28 March 2024, Ido Batash & Léa Vinette, performers ; Mirko Banovic, sound ; Gaspar Schelck lights and staging. Léa Vinette’s work is broadly inspired by an anatomical theory called fasciapulsology interpreted for dance by the choreographer and performance consultant Florence Augendre. Notably, fasciapulsology considers the connective tissue of the body an organ.

A Call for real presence: Exorcise Putin's Black Nail, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 [By Tracy Danison]

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his friends and followers have conjured the Black Nail – the murder idol. Joy in murder. They mean to spread it. 

Without your real presence, without exorcism, the murder idol will take root, in Russia, around the world.

That’s why I will be present in Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon.

Painters, performers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, dancers, bystanders and witnesses, those whose can only sit by and watch – it is time to move, dance, to be there with each other for our friends at war, for our shared vision of a better world, to exorcise the Black Nail.

Wherever you may be between dawn and noon on 15 August 2024, be with me, be with the spirit of poet Alan Ginsberg, who did this first, when it was needed in America. And, as Ginsberg was, be with the tradition of Walt Whitman, who sang liberty and served it, too. Be with the spirit of Isadora Duncan, who re-membered the sacred nature of dance and gifted it to the modern world. 

Putin's gang is not the first to conjure the Black Nail, but Putin is the first in my lifetime to have the power, means and will to drive it hard and deep into human hearts. 

The Black Nail goes beyond the joy of murder and the worship of its idol. Once in the heart, the Black Nail attacks what Dostoyevsky calls “Normal Life”, those things that make life easy and sweet in spite of everything, those things that prevent a war of all against all: fellow feeling, culture, reason, the ordinary integrity of mind, body and soul.

Putin needs the Black Nail now because fortune is turning against him. His fellow travelers, his agents provocateurs and his armies are failing. Normal Life puts a check on him because it puts a check on all grand schemes, evolutions and revolutions. But, especially, Normal Life checks those dreams, such as poor Raskolnikov’s – such as Russia's Bolsheviks' –that call men and women to cruelty, murder and mayhem for justice' sake. Mikhail Gorbatchev invoked Normal Life for Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.  

Driving the Black Nail into human hearts is Putin’s last, best chance for success.

He and his confederates invoked it in the aftermath of the 22 March 2024 Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow.

Just a day after the murders, Russia state television featured a short, seemingly banal, play: four accused paraded before the stern and pitiless judge – from time immemorial, a trope favored by authorities in Russia and elsewhere.

But on closer inspection, it wasn't just ordinary authoritarian messaging. It was invoking the murder idol, tickling at murder joy, conjuring the Black Nail.

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

One of the accused, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, had the right side of his head bandaged, disguising an [a missing] ear. A second, Muhammadsobir Faizov, plopped half-naked in a wheelchair, missed an eye. Two other battered accused, faces swollen and bruised, shambled along with One-Eye and One-Ear.

Even as the sad parade staggered up to the pitiless judge, media were reporting that interrogators had cut off accused Rachabalizoda’s ear and forced him to eat it; accused Faizov’s interrogators had gouged his eye out.

The two battered accused were props, legends that said: With us, not just pitiless judges but bottomless cruelty, too.

Videos of the mutilations and beatings were and are available on the Russia internet as well, doubtless, as elsewhere.

Directed and deliberate, theatrical, naïvely comic, medieval, the conjuration cries: “Look at the cannibal who eats his own ear! Look at Cyclops the cripple! Look! Those sacks-of-shit black-asses can’t even walk straight!”.

Releasing the mutilation videos has no less a part in the dark spectacle.

Once conjured, the Black Nail, like Cupid’s arrow, must get purchase in the heart in order to prosper. Sadism and voyeurism are to the Black Nail what seduction and sex are to love: growth media. Pierced by the Black Nail, the heart longs for dark satisfactions: “Get that scum! Slap it up! Gouge it out! Rip it off! Make it eat it!”.

If you can, be there with me in Kyiv on 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon. Be on your own responsibility for what you believe and be with me to exorcise the Black Nail with real presence. 

______

“Okolotok”, meaning "self-sufficient village" in Ukrainian, is a village run by children in a well-known folk tale, explains Kharkiv-based photographer and creator Yevheniia Laptii. The Mad King is the wild child of the tale. He dreams of seizing total power and a princess living in the shadows along with it. ’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality” photo montage of a children's dramatization of the tale represents Laptii's realization that the tale is both sweet dream and nightmare after a soldier from Russia's occupation force told her “All will be well. If you join us”.

Yevheniia Laptii’s work featured in the 2024 edition of “Circulations”, an annual Europe-wide exhibition of emerging photographers at Centquatre Paris.

Jean Hélion: talking pictures for graphic narrative [By Tracy Danison]

Jean Hélion "Edouard" (1939). Clovis Vail © Photo Jean-Louis Losi
© ADAGP, Paris, 2024

A retrospective exhibition on the painter Jean Hélion at Musée d’Art moderne de Paris called La Prose du monde opened a few weeks back.

Visually, casually, it begins with a monumental triptych recalling the events of May, 1968,  Choses vues en mai (1969), hung on the back wall of the foyer. The piece is in what you might call “graphic novel” style: a panel of intriguing “moments” rather than defined “events” – think of the visual intention that unites Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood, Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

In Hélions’s painting, I am drawn to contemplation of a N° 69 bus-stop pillar, busted in two. I have taken, take to this day, that bus and often. I study the moments around the busted pillar, try to understand what touched Hélion in these moments, am touched myself – there’s memory and more, mystery?, in it. I decide there is something Hélion doesn’t grasp about the two women protesters – neither Marianne, nor copine.

Jean Hélion, "La jeune fille et le mort" (1957
).Photo © Jean-Louis Losi © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

Hélion’s social circumstances make me think of Ferdinand Bardamu, the contemporary, anxious, petit bourgeois hero of Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan.

Born Jean Bichier in 1904 in rural Normandy, Hélion’s father was a taxi driver who had, for “reasons unknown”, changed his name from “Hélion” to “Bichier”. His mother was a dressmaker (or took in sewing).

Then, there’s a certain ellipsis in biographical details that puts me in mind of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. For reasons unknown, baby Jean was left to be nurtured in Normandy by his – maternal? paternal? – grandmother. His parents were from? emigrated to? Amiens (just?). Anyway, in 1912, Jean joined them there. He was eight years old. From 1914 to 1918, Amiens, which is on the Somme river, effectively, the Western Front, was shelled, occupied and liberated several times.

Young Hélion left the battered city in 1920, at 16.

First, he signed/was signed up? for an “industrial school” in Lille. Then dropped out to work as a medicine-preparer for a pharmacy – not a job for uneducated dumb-heads, but apprenticeship, not skilled labor. Then, sometime between all this and 1922, “on the recommendation of a friend”, Jean Bichier went to Paris. He found a job as an architect’s draughtsman, skilled work. Also, presumably, somewhere between 1920 and his arrival in Paris, he had a “first wife”, a woman, also a teenager?, from?, called Andrée Jouart, and, on 29 December 1922, she had a son, Jean’s first child, called Jean-Jacques Bichier, began? painting portraits and landscapes and was meeting other painters.

Jean Hélion "Figure tombée" (1939
). Photo © Centre Pompidou © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

In 1925, when Jean was 21, the art seller and patron Georges Bine launched the architect-draughtsman-cum-new father’s career after they met at the then-new Montmartre all-comers picture market Foire aux Croûtes. Bine advised Jean to change his family name back to Hélion; the association with “Helios” is obvious for an aspiring painter in the age of expression; in 1923, Marie Curie had coined "hélion" to designate the hydrogen nucleus; hélion also has a Biblical etymology and aristocratic connotations.

Whether he was able to make a living painting or remained an architect’s draughtsman, by 1929, Jean Hélion had become an active disciple of abstract, especially, cubist, painting, participating in the creation of the single issue Art Concret and the famous Abstraction-Création collective. He made friends with painters Théo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, become part of the group of trending artists that included Alexandre Calder, Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Victor Brauner.

In this period also, Hélion began work on his Carnets, notes on painting, and kept it up until 1984, and makes life-long friendships with such writers of his time as Raymond Queneau and René Char. In 1934, he divorced? His “first” wife, married an American woman and emigrated to the US, where he became a well-known apostle of abstraction, divorced and married again later and managed to get the attention of collectors and patrons such as the Guggenheim family.

Jean Hélion
”L’Atelier” (1953). Photo Courtesy Applicat-Prazan © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

Looking at Hélion's life story through the paradigm medium of Ferdinand Bardamu, I think it’s probable that until his emigration, Hélion, then 30, was still an apprentice, researching the science of visual representation with some of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful actors ever to sculpt and paint. His passage to “figurative” painting was likely no passage at all but rather a synthesis of what he’d learned about painting in the years since he’d set out to paint. When he began (if he’d actually ever stopped) doing figurative work in the mid- late- 1930s, he’d have been just over 30, was integrating what he’d learned into his painting.

And, when I look at it, Hélion’s painting does represent something unique, a different approach to painting and to narrative, too.

Looking back at his work as I finished the exhibition, in my mind’s eye I see Ferdinand Bardamu doing the preparatory work for Pop Art, pulling together the visual theories and knowledge developed by painters in the wake of photography, using the social and technical economy of a skilled draughtsman to build a base for … I don’t know … for a visual language key for the age of consumption… for something like Disney, Warhol … Lichtenstein… Then for Julius Knipl,  Persepolis … for the inverted bestiary that is Juan Canales Diaz’ and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad … [ … and God knows how many contemporary artists who are building on the heritage and who are not getting seen and experienced because art museums serve the interests of established collectors/collections, “results”-oriented administrators and normative bien pensants clog up their spaces with retrospectives of “modern” centenarians and sesquicentenaries…]

Jean Hélion, “Grande mannequinerie” (1951). Photo © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

Thinking the man and his painting notable for winkling out the esthetic of the prosaic – a drunk sacked out on the sidewalk, a gutted pumpkin a kitchen shelf, a fedora on a head – Musée d’art moderne curators have called the Hélion exhibition La Prose du monde.

But that signifies too much ordinary nostalgia, not enough true memory  – … the-banker-never-wears-a-mac-in-the-pouring-rain… very-strange, Penny Lane sort of stuff. It’s a nice title, but evokes much less than what actually meets the eye once a body’s engaged their noggin and looked around at Hélion’s work.

Fabrice Hergott, director of the museum, put the sense of it better in his remarks to the opening day crowd: the exhibition answers to a demand of contemporary artists who have been influenced by his work, though he didn’t specify what or how.

There’s just more to Hélion than a place in the past or his particular way with visual representation. He figured out, it seems to me, a way to do a new type of visual storytelling, a pictural approach to feelings and emotions that goes well beyond illustrating a legend, a story, a punch line. First off, there’s a consistent way of using light and shadow on the geometries of human space/place/envelope/figure. Then, for Hélion, it’s not a scene and legend or even genre around one of the old figurations-typologies that count as it does count for any number of comic or tragic cartoons over the ages, say, for Velasquez or the Brueghels or for Sketches by Boz or Charlie Hebdo or Bringing Up Father. Rather, Hélion’s pictural story is told by its mise en scène: images that have a tot more glyph than figure, images that don’t so much illustrate or represent or comment stories as tell them. Real things, not analogies or metaphors for a story told outside the frame.

And Hélion’s achievement is a real achievement of the modern era, because, as with movement art, visual art has long been subsumed by its accompanying narrative – it’s a civilizational thing, I reckon. So, it’s no small thing to get the visual “talking” for itself the way Hélion did, the way graphic novelists have done after him.

____

“La prose du monde”, a retrospective of the work of Jean Hélion (1904-1987) is on show from 22 March to 18 August, 2024 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Curator: Sophie Krebs

Choreographer Jean-Christophe Bleton on performing old: Get right up to the edge [By Tracy Danison]

“Ne Lâchons rien” Jean-Christophe Bleton. Photo © Laurent Paillier

Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Ne Lâchons rien (“Don't let up”), was one of the featured pieces in the Faits d’Hiver 2024program. It is cap piece to an admirable and amusing dance performance trilogy called Bêtes de Scène (“Stage Warriors”), which turns around getting older while working in the performing arts. Admirable because it brings up most of the personal and professional issues associated with getting older as a question of how a body is looked at from inside and outside. Amusing because the cast is perfect at what it’s doing and how it’s doing it; the cast comes out, above all, as persons dealing with their challenges, not “ageing [actors, parents, dancers, etc, etc, …]”.

Bleton’s trilogy, put together over the past seven or eight years, includes Bêtes de Scène - masculin (2017) and Bêtes de Scène - feminin (2021) as well as Ne Lâchons rien. The average age of the cast(s) at the premier of the cap piece – including the seven women and seven men from the first two pieces – is 65. The youngest player is 54 and the oldest, 70. All are still working.

Bleton, who has led his dance troupe Cie Les Orpailleurs since founding it in 1990, is a student of the legendary dancer, choreographer and teacher Karin Waehner, knows something about keeping on keeping on – he’s been at it a bit over 50 years . He began dancing professionally in 1973 and then, in 1977, joined Carolyn Carlson on her innovative and ground-breaking contemporary dance project. As Bleton told me in an earlier interview (Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone), he looks at aging and age through a meta-political lens, as a question of making democracy, which, he believes, comes to be when every person is included in identifying and deciding the things that concern them.

“Bêtes de Scène - masculin”, Jean-Christophe Bleton. Photo © Jean-gros Abadie

Bleton and I talked about Ne Lâchons rien and his Bêtes de Scène project during a break from rehearsal session at Centre National de la Danse (CND), earlier this year.

“I didn’t plan Bêtes de scène; it came about by chance,’ he tells me as soon as we were sat down.

“But when you think about it, it makes sense. When I began working on Bêtes de scène - masculin, I was past 50, getting toward 60. I should have already stopped working by that time. I was already past what is the norm.”

So Bleton did what a career performer and choreographer does when confronting his own ab-norm-ality: decided to make a performance about coming to grips with it.

“I told myself I needed to do the piece with my friends and sort of see where we all were at”. How old is too old? At what age should we stop dancing? Should the stopping point be a physical barrier? Or a mental or non-physical barrier?

Bleton’s dramatic inspiration, at least for the first piece of the trilogy, was Akiro Kurosawa’s iconic Seven Samurai(1954), in which, on a promise of rice and beans, seven people join together to save a village – in the same way that, for instance, seven old friends might accept to be cast in an upcoming performance in search of a story, financing and an audience. But there’s more. In addition to being an exotic and brilliant reflection on the sense in things in general, five of Kurosawa’s samurai are particular studies in facing the world as a body grows older, working alongside with, for contrast and cultural critique, a young disciple and an amateur or natural (however you want to frame it).

“Bêtes de Scène - feminin”, Jean-Christophe Bleton. Photo © Laurent Paillier

Bleton gathered a cast of long-time man friends and colleagues.

“We got Bêtes de scène - masculin done. Our women-friends came to see us. They said, ‘You should do one with us’”.

However, the request didn’t seem so straightforward to Bleton.

“I didn’t feel I could be legitimate talking about women’s experiences of life”.

And then, he says, “We were, we are, I am cis-gender heterosexuals” of a certain time and context. Which means, he continues, that neither he, his men performers or women performers ask themselves so much about what is “gendered” in them as about what is “feminine” or “masculine” in their personalities as men or women.

Bleton reflects, “I guess we question gender without questioning gender norms”.

The veteran choreographer resolved his legitimacy and relevancy dilemmas as he did more naturally in the man-version (where he was a member of the cast): by deciding to go ahead and let the women performers present themselves as they defined themselves. As in the man version, he asked the cast to build up a script that mirrored their experiences and their approaches to living and loving while getting older.

Bleton feels that in letting the women do their own take, he got “two pieces [that] are as different from each other as we feel women and men are from each other.”

Aging for the women of Bêtes de scène - feminin, Bleton says, “is a lot more about how they are looked at from the outside” and how they keep a handle on that; it is more political because physical evolution of the image is a greater part of “old” – the game is to fight being excluded. The men of Bêtes de scène - masculin, on the other hand, define “old” around “performance” – referenced as the innumerable health problems, small and large, that seem to assail a man body after 50. The challenge is not so much political or social as personal, a fight to stay relevant or included …

“Ne Lâchons rien” Jean-Christophe Bleton. Photo © Laurent Paillier

In each of the first two pieces and in the third, too, keywords, such as “Resist” or “Do again” or “Too much” referencing common, as well as particular – the particularities that struck me were “nephritic colitis” for the men and “insomnia” for the women – themes are chalked up on the walls of the set.

I have to say, as I talk with Bleton, I’m thinking that maybe men ought to consider more political and social action than they do. Remember Alex and his droogs beating the old tramp in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange? Well, it’s not so much the stereotypes that underlie the representation of oldness in men, but the actual and pervasive de-consideration and de-empowerment that color in the stereotype. Even such notorious sociopaths as the enormously rich and powerful whiteman Rupert Murdoch are not immune from it. As a member of a privileged group, ageism, I think, has a sting that is much more felt and much more concealed. It is consolation to think Murdoch feels it in proportion to his wealth…

But I put these thoughts aside and say to Bleton, does Ne Lâchons rien propose a third gender, a uni-gender, where men and women meet?

“No,” he says, with emphasis.

“Ne Lâchons rien is a meeting of men and women and a meeting with love”.

“Our issue is ‘What is our relationship’ with one another now?

The first two pieces separate along gender lines, he says, but that’s deliberate and desired, “both are fundamentally optimistic” – full of “the will to change and evolve”, to be together now. Ne Lâchons rien brings together the men’s and women’s optimism and their common will to evolve. So, while Bêtes de scène - feminin and -masculin let their characters diverge and define felt differences, Ne Lâchons rien shows them accepting and living with those divergences and differences.

The choreographer and director closes our conversation with the observation that “oldness” is not so much a question of getting older as adapting to oneself. “We can live just fine right up to the edge of the end”, he says.

“You just need to listen to yourself. If you can’t move around, you can still listen and read. There is the moment in life where you can jump over the moon and a moment in life when the book falls out of your hand. Each of those moments is life ...”

________

“Ne Lâchons rien” combines the casts from “Bêtes de scène - masculin” and “Bêtes de scène – feminin”. Choreographed by Jean Christophe Bleton, assisted by Marina Chojnowska, for the premier on 31 January 2024 at MAC Créteil the cast included Lluis Ayet, Odile Azagury, Yvon Bayer, Christian Bourigault, Annick Charlot, Jean-Philippe Costes-Muscat, Jean Gaudin, Vincent Kuentz, Huyen Manotte, Rachel Mateis, Gianfranco Poddighe, Carlotta Sagna, Sylvie Seidmann and Andrea Sitter.

Click for play dates “Ne Lâchons rien” and other cie Orpailleurs productions. Photo © Laurent Paillier

J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie : Straining every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

A propos his work in general and his latest work, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie, choreographer François Lamargot told me last year that he works out from the idea our civilization suffers from “a handicap of the heart” that prevents it from recognizing its own destructiveness.

By “heart” Lamargot means the balance between physically hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling and reacting or feeling. Feeling starts with self. He says people have become so absorbed in themselves that they’ve forgotten how to look around to see how they’re affecting the world around (See: François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart).

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

As far as creating dance performance is concerned, Lamargot says that to get his thinking across, he wants to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to bring his audience to “sensibility” of this civilizational handicap, rather than intellectual understanding of it – he wants to get beyond words and work on imagination.

And, it turns out, in the dancing, Lamargot creates a prolonged, delicious thrill, a crowd-pleasing thrill, that leaves a spectator sitting wondering just where they are for a minute or two after the applause stops.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Karine, my companion, who was sitting in the seat just next to me waited a minute before smiling, raising both eyebrows and asking how I’d describe what had just happened. Smiling back, I said something like “Pina Bausch grooving on an Apocalypse Giselle”.  Then, something like, “Flawlessly executed by woke break dance brats from the down-at-heel social club in the trash-strewn lot we call the 21^st-century...” I said, “Exciting”.

Karine laughed and, as she does, puffed out a light raspberry, saying, “‘Post-Apocalypse’, you mean”. Then,   after a few seconds she says, “They sure can dance”.

She’s right.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Aided and abetted by well-aimed multi-media effects and great sound arrangement (music including Vivaldi, Gloria Patri; Tom Waits, The Earth Died Screaming; and Taku Sugimoto, Spring) Lamargot’s dance performers are as uninhibited as any 80s-style experimentalist free expressionists. But they never romp. There’s not a tic without an elegant purpose. And within the first 10 minutes, the trim, athletic hip-hop trained performers subjugated Karine and I with a “beyond Waltz” that was both professionally knowing and inspired; alone and together, they radiated the noble sensuality of Waltz …

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

This, what, respect for? genre movement and the layers of expression and sense beneath it characterized the whole piece… Honestly, Karine and I agree, the mix and range of dance skill is so smooth and matched to sensibility as to be indescribable.

Lamargot does claim to have turned out his own genre in what everybody these days seems to be calling “hybrid dance” – combining moves and even ideologies from theater, performance, ballet, modern, contemporary and urban dance in a single choreographic piece. Maybe that’s right. And maybe, in reality, all choreographers have always been doing that. Be all that as it may J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie is dance performance with something quite wonderful in it.

____

I saw “J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” at Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar, 4 February 2024, with performers: Anaïs André, Joël Elisée Konan, Alexandre Gastoud, Oscar Lassus dit Layus, Cassilda Marcoulet, Anabella Pirosento and Erwan Tallonneau. Directorial assistance and costuming: Maryse Poulhe. Interactivity, multimedia, lights and scenography: Claudio Cavallari, Allan Hové and Benjamin Lebreton

Writing urban dance into traditional ecstatics: “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

… And some contrast, comparisons and observations… A Folia (“Folly”) by Marco da Silva Ferreira, performed by Ballet de Lorraine, premiered with Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s Instantly Forever on the same stage on Thursday 7 March at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy, France.

Breathing hard and a little too excited at the end of da Silva Ferreira’s stimulating handiwork, I wanted to call the CaleyJacobssondaSilvaFerreira program a “diptych”.

After all, Jacobsson and Caley chose to invite da Silva Ferreira to Nancy and asked the popular almost hip-hopchoreographer to create a Folia specially for the company they’ve been leading for more than a decade.

But “diptych” would imply “complementarity”, sharing something more than a stage. Or suggest that the same topography of sense is explored, maybe, or, maybe that the same style of approach to movement art is in play.

But the experience of the two dance performances is very different and whatever complementarities my friends at the Nancy ballet might feel, spectator experience is the bottom line. No?

The remarkable reflective black stage floor is shared, for instance. At first look, it seems complementary, but just isn’t. Its choreographic, visual use is too different. For Instantly Forever, it’s a multiplying mirror on a wheeling merry-go-round as against the inviting glitter of a universal urban-dance dancefloor, à la Michele Murray’s Dancefloor, also created for Ballet de Lorraine and premiered in April 2023.

 

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Also, in general, the dominant visual quality of Instantly Forever is saturation, gives a sense of in media res; a Folia is resolutely the sum of its people.

A Folia’s movement is choreographed in the frame of urban dance (hip hop). Urban dance starts as energy and shapes it into dance. Instantly Forever is choreographed in a (free) frame of modern and contemporary dance. Modern and contemporary dance create then shape energy. A spectator feels that difference and the sensibilities that it induces.

Typical in urban dance, the men and women of A Folia scintillate as they gradually fill their dramatic space with loose groups, larger, smaller, individuals. As the men and women find their places in the one large, also loose, group that has taken shape, they become performers – those for whom dance is “performance”, a shaping of their energy as a relationship, I mean.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The rest of da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia choreography also presents pretty much the same as in any urban dance piece: energetic, often duo-ing or coupling or gathering affinity groups, shaping and molding each other, finding unisson (being together). Within unisson, one by one, champions come forward to battle – where a performer shows their moves and interested on-lookers choose “winners” (but not “losers”). For more on urban dance convention, see B.girl, choreographer, member of the jury: Valentine Nagata-Ramos on evaluating Olympic break dance. 

Da Silva Ferreira’s singular attractiveness as an urban dance choreographer is an ability to ignore genre even as he shapes performers and spectators alike around its conventions. In a Folia, as he explains in his notes, he wants to see what ecstasy does and where it gets to (“a folia” (“folly”) refers to acculturated ecstasy dance in Medieval Portugal). In other words, and I’m exaggerating to make the point, if da Silva Ferreira feels he needs to chain together a Krump foot-stomp, a Pina Bausch melodramatic sub-mime and a surprisingly precise grand jété to show out what he wants to show out, he’ll do it.  

An entrancing solo – a real, live New York City Ballet-style solo –  by Céline Shoefs in the midst of a Folia’s kaleidoscope of sets of forms of touching and supporting and showing off underlines my point. No Swan – not Anna Pavlova, not Pedro Pauwels & cie and etc… – ever died with as much spirit in the thing – or as many great moves. En pointe, pirouettes, throw downs and pure expression, elegant and abrupt, assured and modest, Shoefs brings everyone to unisson with her parade. Wonderful work by her.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

And, another Da Silva Ferreira attractive singularity: while the energy and performance-focus involved in, for instance, a tour de force such as Shoefs’ solo, most often comes out as athletic and power in urban dance performance, Ferreira’s hand turns it erotic. Shoefs solo goes beyond affirming her own qualities, goes beyond battle, she happens, preludesencounter.

A Folia’s soundtrack, da Silva Ferreira explains in the program notes, is an iteration of the Early Modern and now pretty universally shared chord progression called “La Folia” or “Folly”, which, as “a Folia” in Portuguese is also ritual ecstasy and carnival-like sexual turnabout.  

The performance’s musical arrangement in effect has electronic musician Luis Pestana “deejaying” Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor La Folia, Op. 5 N°12 by. Pestana’s sounds first push performers and spectators along with a beat that laps at the vibratory edge of techno-club style heart-defibrillation before embracing all in a stimulating beat from beginning to end of the show. Marco da Silva Ferreira is trying to write urban dance into a History of Dance while in its generated sensibility and references Jacobsson and Caley’s Instantly Forever is about history and the experience and perception of history, small h.

And, all this being said, the experience of a Folia left me feeling dizzy-damn good.

So, Bob’s your uncle. When a Folia’s up against Instantly Forever “contrast” best fits the bill.

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine  

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

On historical cuffs and blows: Jacobsson & Caley’s “Instantly Forever” incarnates, pleases [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The premier of the dance performance Instantly Forever by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley, performed by Ballet de Lorraine, took place Thursday, 7 March 2024, at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy, France.

Last time I wrote, I was speculating on the sense of the word group “Instantly Forever”, also the title of Thomas Caley’s and Petter Jacobsson’s last piece as chief choreographers for Ballet de Lorraine as a palimpsest of points and lines in time and painted in movement.

What follows is my live experience as far as I can describe it.

A gigantic symphonic crash makes me jump.

The full cast of twenty-two abruptly turn into one hundred faces that face me. Before or after the crash? Not sure.

The floor of the stage is mirror black. 

Four or six or eight long, silver poles, hang from scaffolding above, frame the six hundred dancers as they might for painted wooden horses, Indian elephants or Bakelite autos on an old merry-go-round. There’s one a little like it in Luxembourg Gardens.

Saturation.

On their tee-shirts, the eight hundred wear selfies of themselves.

Each moves according to their penchant. Saturation of people. Groups show out and sort in a slow, wheeling throng.

I notice the music.

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Caley and Jacobsson have chosen for Instantly Stravinsky’s avant garde score Le Sacre du Printemps, made for Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes, which premiered a hundred and 10 years ago, on 29 May 1913. Also, extracts from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians Pulses Section I and Section II. I see in mind’s eye, from a Lafayette Anticipations catwalk, 15 September 2018, Yuika Hashimoto wheeling Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Violin Phase rosace. From 1981, it’s De Keersmaeker’s first work. My heart still thumps when I think of it.

Le Sacre is a ritual début performance for dance initiates to this day. At least in France. At least from Béjart.

Ballets Russes’ Le Sacre du Printemps caused a sensation. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie were assassinated exactly a year and 1 month later, 29 June 1914. Which seemed significant then. Sensation rattles on, notably in the sandbagged dressing room windows at Kiev Opera House.

Among other things, Le Sacre evokes people as one species among others, as originators of their desires, as actors of their myths, as victims of all that – Caley, especially, enthuses about Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

I think, in its resounding way, Le Sacre must be Freud, Jung, Rothko, Rosa Parks, Roe vs Wade and World War III, too.

I look up.

Ballet de Lorraine, “Instantly Forever” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Seeing one thousand in movement, I remember a trailer from the movie of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. It shows cells under a microscope swaying along in a flicker-flow. It puzzled me then. The 1 thousand dancing are bound by the space around them; what separates them by eye is the boundary of contact …

When I find I am not looking up, I do.

The applause begins. The lights go up…

I come away, touched.

Later, when I scan the program notes during the intermission, I read that the choreographers meant Steve Reich’s repetitive sounds to plunge me “into a perpetual, repetitive and hypnotic motion” that invited me to contemplation.

I’m thinking it’s odd what images of the splashing cascade of sense information we experience sticks to the memory.

If what sticks is so personal and contextual as to be random, what’s all this guff about History, then?

As I’m returning to my seat for a Folia, the next piece on the Ballet’s program, what, with the experience of Instantly Forever in mind and a little champagne, I’m thinking sourly, but not unreasonably, that History as it’s a time line thus far, anyhow, might be, as dear old Ebenezer Scrooge puts it, “a bit of undigested beef”.

That is, History is analogous to the cumulative effect of a rain of cuffs and blows on the head of an autistic kid by a petulant, infernal Father, in spirit, three years old. Each cuff and each blow is a black point or blob of hurt and resentment stitched together by pain and incomprehension. History of points and lines like this would go some way toward explaining Vladimir Putin as a leader, Donald Trump as God’s Messiah, and Israel eyeless in Gaza…  

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

______________

In coming months you can catch the Ballet de Lorraine on tour in these venues across France (and Morocco and Italy, too):

26 March, La Rotonde, Thaon-les-Vosges :

Twelve Ton Rose (Trisha Brown)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

4 and 5 May, Le Hangar Y, Meudon

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

23, 24, 25 and 26 May, Opéra national de Lorraine, Nancy

Màlon, new creation & premier (Ayelen Parolin)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

1 June, CCN d'Aix-en-Provence

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Morocco tour, Instituts Français du Maroc

5 June, Casablanca

6 June, El Jadida

7 June, Rabat

9 June, Meknes

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival Freestyle, Paris

22 and 23 June, La Villette,

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival de Montpellier Danse

30 June, Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley), Place de la Comédie

2 and 3 July, Dancefloor (Michèle Murray), Agora

5 July, Soirée Merce Cunningham, Opéra Comédie

CRWDSPCR, RainForest, Sounddance

15 July, Bolzano (Italy) Danza Festival

Sierras, Danses Atmosphériques (Michele di Stefano)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

28, 29 and 30 July, Le Voyage à Nantes, Le Feydball

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

 

 

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: a point in time, a line, the line, a period, instantly and forever [By Tracy Danison]

"Discofoot" (2016), Ballet de Lorraine, by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

I take the title Instantly Forever a couple of ways. Instantly is forever. Forever is an instant. I can reformulate that as I might in my philosophical cups: I never step into the same river twice; everything, including self, flows. Line and period. Particle. Wave. In my ordinary way of framing everyday action, I put “Instantly Forever” something like this: the present moment is all the feeling, experience and events + myself of the past.

In an ordinary way, I reckon, “Instantly Forever” describes Thomas Caley and Petter Jacobsson’s meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine back in 2011. They came to Nancy in the wake of Didier Deschamps’ very successful mandate there; Deschamps was going on to successfully lead the Théâtre national de Chaillot (National Dance Theater, ‘Chaillot’), which he did until just three years ago, when he was replaced by Rachid Ouramdane, now running Chaillot.

Petter Jacobsson (L), Thomas Caley (R). Photo © Ballet de Lorraine - CCN

In addition to planning their future inside somebody else’s great professional success, the couple stepped into France’s sociocultural reality: “You can’t just fire everybody and stamp your name on things because the law won’t let you,” notes Caley. “You just can’t start over. So you have to work with memory ([memory:] what has been done and thought and felt)”.

To begin talks with the former director’s successful troupe, Jacobsson and Caley brought the popular choreographer, (working) dancer and interdisciplinary artist La Ribot to Nancy.

“She asked everybody their opinion. There was some turnover, of course, but [from La Ribot’s intervention] we had our basic group.”

There is something of “Instantly Forever” in La Ribot, too. “[La Ribot’s] solo and collective performances, installations, films and videos are the many facets of a practice”, says her website, “that constantly focuses on the rights of the body”. That means, I think, from having seen the multidisciplinary artist’s choreographic work, that she has no truck with the destructive body-stressing that a lot of classical and modern dance performance practice has associated with dance-excellence and a lot to do with the body. Since bodies have different tolerance levels, La Ribot’s practice implies a wider space for individual expression in group performance. I’ve already argued that, as spectator, the diversity of individual expression within a troupe performance is the outstanding characteristic of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine (Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: how to choreograph availability).

Rehearsal for “a Folia” (“Folly”), creation by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Ballet de Lorraine – CCN

If the meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine was a line and a period, a work in memory and an affirmation of a choice in dance performance practice, in an ordinary way, Caley’s and Jacobsson’s past experience is also “Instantly Forever”.

The couple came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s – they met each other in Manhattan in 1994, with Caley just a few years into a high-level dance performance career and Jacobsson moving from prestige dance to doing his own performance and choreography thing. They frequented Mother and Bar Room 432, where new spectrum was being added to the culture.

In the post-Stonewall, punker, world, politics and arts of community – especially queer –  were tweaking out new spaces for dance and performance, visual arts (integrating audio-visual technologies into live performance, deejaying and public participation formats, for example) and the limits of the acceptable imagination. These came together with undertakings such as Clit Club, MEAT, Jackie 60, Martha@Mother and Click + Drag.  

Jacobsson and Caley did choreography for Martha@Mother, Richard Move’s Martha Graham love and deconstruction dance performance.

When invited to Stockholm to direct the Royal Swedish Ballet of Stockholm in 1999, Jacobsson and Caley decided to use the Ballet, along with the Royal Opera and its Orchestra, and outside artists to both blur the lines between performance and non-performance space, public- and citizen-space and bring together insiders and outsiders, spectators and performers with two huge (and publically and critically acclaimed) happenings in the Royal Opera House. Without even talking about the science and philosophy behind it, I think that it can be argued that, in those days, all that was new – as if a guerilla theater had recruited Everyman to dance a conceptual Swan Lake by Tracey Emin. It worked for the public, too.

Air-Condition (2021), Ballet de Lorraine, by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Emilie-Salquebre

So, success feeds success. When they set up their own company after 2001, Caley and Jacobsson were especially eager, they say, to “push the lines between norms” with their own work. Titles such as Unknown partner, Flux, No mans land - no lands man and The nearest nearness represent their search, I would say, to interpenetrate “instantly” and “forever”.

And in Stockholm, at the beginning of the 21^st century, Caley and Jacobsson agree, they were trying to continue, as they say, pushing the lines between norms or, as I put it, interpenetrating instantly and forever, the period and the line, the past and the present, dance and performance: Untitled Partner #3, Performing performing, Rêlache (“Let go”or “Free day”),Timetable, Armide (viz., Lully’s 1686 opera-ballet), Record of ancient things, L’envers (“Reverse”, “Upside down”, “Behind”), Revue Moderne, For Four Walls, Discofoot (“Disco(dancing)+foot(ball”), Haendel with care, Air-condition and Mesdames et Messieurs…

Instantly, thus, Forever.

____

I talked to Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley about their work so far in Paris in January 2024.

Spring & Summer 2024, Ballet de Lorraine: “A Folia” (“Folly”), the new creation by Marco da Silva Ferreira will premier with Petter Jacobsson’s and Thomas Caley’s “Instantly Forever”. The couple’s last Spring and Summer in Nancy also includes Ayelen Parolin’s new creation, “Malón”. Other Nancy-grown creations for the season include “Static Shot” by Maud Le Pladec, created for Ballet de Lorraine in 2020 along with Michele di Stefano’s “Danses Atmosphériques”, 2022 and Caley and Jacobsson’s “Discofoot”. Other Ballet de Lorraine productions include works such as Trisha Brown’s “Twelve-ton Rose” and three Merce Cunningham pieces, “Sounddance”, CRWDSPCR”, “RainForest”. Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot” will be the final production in July. Le Pladec succeeds Jacobsson and Caley as director of the Ballet de Lorraine.

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: how to choreograph availability [By Tracy Danison]

Rehearsal for “Instantly forever”, Petter Jacobsson's and Thomas Caley's swan song for Ballet de Lorraine, premiers at the Opéra de Lorraine, 7 March 2023. Photo © CCN – Ballet de Lorraine

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley, the creative partnership that has been keeping up, progressing and shaping Ballet de Lorraine (Centre Chorégraphique National - CCN) into one of the best regional dance troupes in Europe since 2011, are leaving at the end of the current season. 2024 also marks 30 years for the couple’s creative partnership.

In the beginning of this year, I got to talk with Jacobsson and Caley. Before we met, I told them that I was thinking about their care and feeding of Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because, as a spectator, I have always been impressed by what I think of as the company’s “lability of individuals and invisible discipline”.

“Invisible” references the, mostly unexplored and intangible, quite real, intelligence that inspires relationships and holds people together.

I say “invisible discipline” rather than “transparent” because, while many companies seem to transparently shape themselves around an idea, the Ballet de Lorraine troupe seems to use each person’s intelligence of the other to form and shape an idea such as “Instantly forever”, the title, theme and idea of the Caley and Jacobsson’s latest creation.

Put it this way. It seems to me that while most companies respond to Blake’s Urizen – “One command, one joy, one desire/One curse, one weight, one measure” – the Lorraine troupe responds to e pluribus unum, as it says on the Almighty Dollar, “From many, one”.

Petter Jacobsson (L) and Thomas Caley (R) are leaving Ballet de Lorraine. Photo © CCN – Ballet de Lorraine

As the conversation with Jacobsson and Caley went along, I realized that when it comes to understanding Ballet de Lorraine’s “individual lability and invisible discipline”, wondering about care and feeding is wrongheaded, like asking a successful basketball coach about dribbling technique.

Jacobsson and Caley, pleasant, generous and charming as they are, don’t care and feed anybody. They respect them as individuals in their circumstances, as they do between themselves. As they talked I see them practice their approach, their attitude, their state of mind: a strong emotional empathy, not a set of commands and rules, oils the gears of their interactions between themselves, with me; intellectual empathy and a focus on results, rather than a rally to a pre-fabricated idea, fuels their conversation between themselves, with me.  

Near the end of our conversation, Jacobsson says, “It’s called the ‘Ballet’ de Lorraine, but we’re thinking of ‘Dance’. The troupe is a reflection of the society [that it is part of]. Grab onto the dance [that is there]”. Caley breaks in, “It’s not that we think ‘Everybody can dance’, but that everybody is proficient and professional at what they do. We want proficiency in doing above everything”…

Together, they insist, “Our idea is ‘Stay available [for the other, for dance]”.’; ‘Believe in what you are doing’”.

The two men search, express and shape rather than explain. Their approach to the Ballet de Lorraine is simply “Follow me!”. So, when, as a spectator, I see “invisible discipline” and “lability” in the Lorraine troupe, I am seeing emotional and intellectual empathy in action: individuals who are available to each other who are doing their best to express and shape a theme or an idea.

Christine Bastin: You won’t have the words for your transcendence. But your dance will [By Tracy Danison]

Christine Bastin, center rear, artistic director, Fabrique de la Danse, with students. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

Christine Bastin is a co-founder, with Orianne Vilmer, of Fabrique de la Danse, where Bastin has been artistic director and Vilmer has been director since 2015. Fabrique de la Danse was the first and remains the only dance school currently able to deliver a professional certification for choreographers.

Bastin calls herself a “dance native” and says she does not remember a time when she did not dance. She began dancing at 7 or 8 years old and was among the first graduates of Danse Création, an innovative contemporary dance performance school in the northern city of Lille, a brainchild of the charismatic dancer and teacher Anne-Marie Debatte (1918-2002), which opened its doors in 1975. Dance Création philosophy and mission were to educate and train “strong, joyful and responsible beings in relation with others and present in the world”. 

Debatte was among the pioneers in opening (or re-opening) dance to encompass and include human difference with intergenerational dance, dance for seniors and persons with disabilities as well as promoting dance in schools, businesses and public institutions such as senior living. Currently an associate at the coaching and well-being consultancy Optimé Persona, Christine Bastin has made this openness to movement activities and publics a significant part of her career.

“Lessons in dance were lessons in living,” Christine Bastin tells me. Her teachers and fellow students were a second family. She learned, she says, “not just to dance but also to put on a show, to teach and to create”, all the skills that she continues to use to this day.

For Bastin, dance is a spiritual resource. She describes it almost as a demiurge or spirit guide. “Dance was always there for me,” Bastin says. “It made me happy. It made it possible to express the joy I felt within myself. Dance is the creation of the world. Movement is living. If we leave it alone, dance will join [the split in] our body and mind”.

I ask her, To what end? Where does dance lead us?

She replies, “I’m looking for a transcendence. I think we are all looking for a transcendence.” When transcendence comes, she says, we won’t have the words for it, but dance will.

Christine Bastin came on the scene when the Nouvelle Danse Française – a movement away from the formalisms of American-style modern dance and Opera-de-Paris-style ballet – was expanding into the broad notion that has become “contemporary dance [performance]”. She joined other disciples of AlwIn Nikolaïs (an early actor in the Nouvelle Danse, a proponent of multimedia input in live performance and of “total dance” and dance as an aspect of an “art of motion” which is both message and medium, who arrived in Paris from the USA in 1968) in seeking new ways to perform and understand dance.

Bastin started dancing with choreographer Christine Gérard’s cie ARCOR. Gérard, along with Carolyn Carlson, Dominique Bagouet and Jaque Chaurand is among the best-known and most iconic movers of contemporary dance performance into the present.

Christine Bastin dancing her ”Fruition” (2013). Photo © cie la folia

Since the mid-1980s, Bastin has authored and produced more than 40 dance-performance choreographies, including guest pieces for prestigious events such as Biennale de danse de Lyon and Festival d’Avignon.

“Dance creation is a mirror of the self,” Bastin says. “Building a dance is to give form to an equilibrium which will then unbalance to bring about another equilibrium”, which equilibrium will then birth another...”. Bastin smiles pleasantly: “One dance can hide another”, in the way trains can.   

In the choreographic process, she continues, movement cleans up the original thought or idea behind it. In movement, the body has its own thought. ‘Mind-thought’ is the detonator for the ‘body-thought’” that gives real substance to dance performance.

Each of her choreographies, Bastin says, corresponds to some aspect of self-discovery, expression, opening outward or inclusion. Her Gueule du Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), which she was invited to write for the 1992 Biennale de danse de Lyon, is an example.

Intellectually framed, as she explains it, by Federico Garcia-Lorca’s idea of duende –  …  “a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought”… – and with the thought of exploring the power of the unexpressed emotion such as Camilo José Cela dramatizes it in his classic The Family of Pascual Duarte, Gueule du Loup began with the question, mind-thought, “How do you express the great feeling inside you when there are no words for it”? or “How can the ‘poor in spirit’ make themselves exist?”

As Gueule du Loup responds to these questions, Bastin says, its movement, its body-thought, corresponds to “transmission to amateurs”. “The piece is simple and complex at the same time,” she explains, “But, especially, it is spiritual. To do the piece, you need technical ability, yes, but also, you need to find yourself as a dancer”.

In fact, Bastin’s involvement with Fabrique de la Danse began when Orianne Vilmer’s amateur dance performance troupe, Danse en Seine, contacted the choreographer about putting on Gueule du Loup.

Promoting and supporting dance performance has played a prominent part of Bastin’s career. She has developed and led dance promotion and sensitization programs the length and breadth of France, in the Paris suburbs and in its regions, as well as in Africa and Eastern Europe. “Dance connects us,” Bastin explains, giving me the example of an improvisational dance exercise: “Nobody has the steps or the music, but everybody has the appetite and the curiosity. Pressed by the appetite and the curiosity, the connection [that takes shape as dance] falls into place.”

______

I first met Christine Bastin at the Pavillon Carré Baudoin, once a country pleasure palace and, now beautifully restored, sitting on the very-urbanized lip of the rue des Pyrénées where it meets rue de Menilmontant. Bastin was watching her students and colleagues go through the public performance for the Fabrique de la Danse’s end-of-year 2022-2023 celebration. We met again to talk about “What is dance for”? in October 2023.

Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:

La Folia (1986), Bless (1989), Abel Abeth (1990), Grâce (1991), Gueule de loup (1992), Affame (1993), Siloé (1994), La Polka du roi (1996), La Fugue (1996), Première neige (1997), Le p’tit Bal (1996), Noce (1998), L’eau vive (1998), Be(1999), Pigeon vole (2000), Un ange à la mer (2001), Pietà (2001), Elle & Lui (2003), De la lune et de l’eau (2003), Les mots blancs (2005), Florentina (2005), Même pas seul (2006), Celui qui danse (2006), Mariam (2007), J’m’attache à toi(2008), L’Entrouvert (2008), L’eau de personne (2010), Soir d’avril (2011), Fruition (2013), Cette parcelle de trésor(2013), Danse avec mon père (2014) and Noce l’invisible (2022).

Hey-ho Billy Pilgrim! 2024 is 1979 and getting worse [By Tracy Danison]

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Jérémy Meysen

Remember the scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five when, from behind his bandages, Billy Pilgrim whispers “I was there” to fellow patient Eliot Rosewater? There meant at the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War.

Billy’s “I was there” is the debut of a short career explaining that Time is of a piece, a Truth he learned when kidnapped and living among the ETs of the planet Tralfamadore.

I fell into Billy Pilgrim consciousness during a performance of Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Forteresses, a sit-down theatrical narrative around the experiences of the playwright’s mother and two of his aunts before during and after the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Though Shaheman’s play notes emphasize the immigrant family experience –  if I had only notes and pictures and hadn’t seen the actual play, I would have thought it was about Shaheman himself –  his mother and aunts do all the talking. They talk about themselves and the mechanics of their lives right up to now, when they’ve become pretty much somebody’s unremarkable mom or granma or neighbor with a foreign accent. They are women of my own age, of my companion Karine’s age, of the age of most folks I know.

The mechanics of Shaheman’s mother’s and aunts’ lives come down to trying to deal with disabilities imposed on being a woman. Indeed, each woman’s story boils down to an unassuming tale of institutional, economic and sentimental dependence.

Shaheman’s mother is utterly dependent on an abusive husband and also has children to protect. One aunt has her aspirations systematically blown off by new woman-hating legislation which comes along to back up failing custom, the third is thwarted by sentimental entanglement with a blameless man.

I expect that Shaheman meant the title Les Forteresses – “Fortresses” – to allude to the rock-solid “strength” and “resiliency” of the women in the face of personal hardship and exile.

But what Billy Pilgrim heard was the women’s painful chorus of “What The Fuck?”

Because, frankly, why should one expect to be blocked and punished at every turn for what one is?

Condign punishment for existing was just not the expectation in the post-war world of 1979. Not in Iran and not in the USA. Not anywhere.

I was among the last of the John Gardner-Robert Creeley literati cohort at State University at Buffalo, which was, in 1979, already then, as today, a global engineering-education hub. Many of Shaheman’s mother and aunts’ national and spiritual brothers (and just a few sisters!) were there with me, aspiring to a modern education for a modern life.

Forteresses made me understand that “I was there”, an actor in the play, when Shaheman’s mother and aunts were coming of age. I believed then, as they believed, that women’s equality, like racial equality, like human equality, was a given of modernity.

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Agnès Mellon

All of us were carried along by the warm wind of revolution and naïve positivism.

Virtually no Iranian could imagine then that the lightning flashes of woman-hating were not just throwbacks to an atavistic “medieval Islam”, soon to dissipate in the sunshine of modernity. In the USA, I was not alone to think that egregious fanatic Phyllis Schlafly was a throwback, the fears of unisex toilets and the failure of the ERA, a joke, all a tribute to a sad, but dying, Christian atavism.

I explained away the Iran regime's obvious woman-hating then as “decolonization”, “national-religious” assimilation of the “fact of modernity”.

I was as wrong and as naïve about Schlafly and her Eagle Forum movement as Shaheman’s female relatives and those mostly young men chattering to beat the band in our student union were about the revolution that Khomeini’s Islamists seized.

In the USA and in Iran, the year 1979 marked the end of passive and customary resistance to women’s equality and a turn toward the active woman hating promoted across the world today. As much as Khomeini’s revolution, the success of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum gave the impetus for active opposition to women’s equality – i.e. woman hating – as a sine qua non of  “the fact of modernity”.

So, when I actually watch the action and listen to the stories, Forteresses is about how explicitly woman hating ideology has organized and strengthened to block and turn back women’s rights since 1979.

Ruhollah Khomeini’s ideological legacy is no medieval throwback, unless, of course, I suppose  that the regime’s nuclear, ballistic and cyber weapons capabilities, without speaking of its logistics and command and control capabilities, have been plucked out of a miraculous cave just outside Qom.

Iran’s government today is ready to club and poison every woman in the country to preserve itself – it should come as no surprise that de facto allies Russia (whose imperial venture in Ukraine is blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow) and Hamas unapologetically use rape as a weapon of war.

And what is Schlafly descendant  Tucker Carlson’s flushed-face “Christian national values” if not “the fact of modernity” without woman’s equality? In 21 states of the USA a woman may not freely dispose of her body; there is still no ERA...  

In 2024, woman hating is the name of their game wherever we live. No mistake.

___

The performers Shady Nafar, Guilda Chaverdi, Mina Kavani interpreted, accompanied and gave voice to Gurshad Shaheman’s mother and aunts at the 6 February 2024 performance of Shaheman’s Forteresses at Théâtre de la Bastille. Theirs was a profoundly Tralfamadorian performance. Nafar, Chaverdi and Kavani manage to crystallize, universalize and make timeless the vulnerability, discrimination and personal stagnation inflicted by inequality based on gender. A special shout out to Shady Nafar, whose empathic interpretation and rhetorical skill moved me especially deeply.

Silvia Gribaudi: Jump bigly! Monstrous revenge and the mystifications of age [By Tracy Danison]

“R.OSA” with Claudia Marsicano, by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Laila Pozzo

Ideas will get into the air. No sooner do I start thinking about criticism and difference (Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference), then all sorts of complexities wink on in the gloom: era, psychic construction, typology… you name it.

For instance, when I was a kid, there was still a Fat Lady at the local fair, a friendly monster… (Who, by the way, didn’t seem so very fat to me, just poor, while the uber-bellied Muscle Man surely was fat. His strength was all in the hollow barbells). Also, I realize that I seem to have been seeing my aging pretty much as deliquescence: I’m a wrinkling Captain Willard, waning with each vital breath as, all around, the jungle waxes hungry.

What’s the mission? What’s the mission?

Under cover of Christophe Martin’s Faits d’Hiver 2024 program, with performances of Grand Jeté, a new piece, and R.OSA, a classic, creator Silvia Gribaudi made a planned release of thornier perspectives for both age and body at Théâtre des Abbesses.

Gribaudi’s R.OSA twists the scrawny neck of my remembered Fat Lady friendly monster narrative. She doesn’t sweep her away as incorrect or supply me an updated version. She fixes her permanently in the corner of my eye, as a pense-bête.

Performer Claudia Marsicano, body mass deformed by obesity, balances delicately on tiny feet, gestures with tiny hands. The adipose swell of her thighs presents a baby-smooth bulging sex to me. Marsicano, between a gorgeous warble and well-meaning, no doubt healthy, weight-reducing, series of shared exercises, creates a sort of revenge porn that flays off the moral high ground and stuff a body can intellectually snatch at as she neutrally self-affirms: I am not just more out of control and weaker and stiffer than this fatso Claudia Marsicano, my thinking is cloudy, too.

R.OSA ends with a rendition of Brittney Spears’ Toxic – eminently danceable for Marsicano. But not for me. Marsicano also manages to capture the inscrutable doubleness of the song’s video. Abbesses was not full – it seemed to me younger people were more absent. Like me, they were afraid, I guess, either of dealing with the Fat Lady monster issue or with having to submit to a possible failure in a satire of it.

Age! Niagara Falls! Slowly I write, and step by step, inch by inch, I get up to … Gribaudi’s Grand Jeté. Jeté is ballet jargon for “jump”. Grand is “big”. Tone is important. Grand Jeté is vaudeville not comedy, parody, not farce.

The parody features the MM Contemporary Dance Company, a company so good and so full of zest and energy that it put me in mind of the wonderful gusto of Hofesh Schechter. But without the gangland-murder-on-the-Basel-zubringer affect.

“Le Grand Jeté” by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Andrea Macchia

With preternatural teamwork, MM Company do everything from classical hip hop to girly ballet-school twirls to buck and shake a joyful Gribaudi choreography that boils down to a variety show with singalong and acts explained (why?) in embarrassed euro English interspersed with pidgin French and a little muttered Italian.

Silvia Gribaudi, not MM Dance, however, dressed for middle-aged dumpy, makes the show, highlights the company’s excellence, makes the audience laugh. She’s the disabused host of Yugoslav state television’s Saturday Singalong (you can see her trying to gauge how she can get by on inertia and expectations; there’s a lot of confused applause and participative false starts). Part of it is just the charming lost-ness of a good clown assuming the well-worn embarrassment trope. The Old Girl is tiredly game for it: she struggles to twist, bend and crimp up with the company’ lithe young assassins. Gribaudi (pretends to tire?) tires quickly, lets go, her expressions (are meant to?) comment her fatigue, the strain of entertaining.

At a certain moment everyone takes off their top. All fold an arm over their breasts; Gribaudi, though, has very big breasts. Not so easy to hold. And, quite suddenly, I realize that – even if I could see that she has been hamming it up, there’s no way a dance performer of Gribaudi’s experience would be such a dead mackerel – every bit of her out-of-place-ness is because of what she is: gotten older but not because she’s old. And it’s not so much that she’s out of place but that there isn’t a place for old, just for the play acting of age and its problems. At least, there isn’t if all you mean to do is Jump Bigly! …

In Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, the first victim of Alex and his droogs is an old drunk. The drunk is a sort of Don Juan figure: he not only survives (a fierce kicking), his song becomes motif: “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it's no world for an old man any longer…”

So, what are we all doing here? Out of place? Or playing at it? What’s the mission? Is it funny?

“The Power of the Fragile”: When Jocasta says “no” quid Oedipus? [By Tracy Danison]

“The Power of the Fragile” by Mohamed Toukabri. Photo © Christian Tandberg

The last time I saw my mother she was in a hospice bed, barely alive; I can’t remember the year. I grabbed her hand, muttered “Bye, Ma”, left the room, drove to the airport. The last, and perhaps only, time I remember my mother hugging me as an adult was in 1973, when I left the house for good. I can still hear the screen door slam behind me.

Although I regret nothing – all things considered, I feel these memories as perfectly in-performance. They are sad goodbyes; they represent the supposed pudeur – the profound emotional reticence – of the culture I grew up in. And to tell the truth I’ve always thought there’s something profound and true in that reticence.

But I started to wonder about that a few days ago, when, my brain a-churn, I staggered out of the auditorium and into the foyer in the wake of a performance of Mohamed Toukabri’s The Power of the Fragile.

Fragile boils down to the story of the separation of Toukabri and his mother; early in life, Toukabri got a dance scholarship in Belgium and until this production his mother has not been permitted to visit him there.

To tell the story, mother and son – easy, tender, respectful – dance, hold and regard each other for about an hour. Speaking a mix of Arabic and French, Toukabri shows his mom around the performance space, introduces her to spectators, teaches her some useful English stagecraft words; together they find music that talks to Mimouna’s dance (she wanted to be a dancer but couldn’t).

Mimouna Khamessi sits on a little stool to tell us her story. As she talks, son Mohamed shows off his moves – gives a little visual biography of his artistic evolution. Toukabri talks of growing up and taking wing in a society “where you can be who you want”. He talks up his European citizenship. Near the end of the show, he costumes Mimouna as “Statue of Integration”.

It was the ease and respect that set my brain a-churn, sent me staggering out of the auditorium.

“The Power of the Fragile” by Mohamed Toukabri. Photo © Christian Tandberg

All that touching, all that tenderness!

I was not alone in psychic churn, either. I caught the eye of a woman friend not so much younger than me. Her brain was achurn, her voice a bit husky, too.

Someone later suggested that our, the, churn and stagger came down to a confrontation between very different cultures, the one, fat and warm, my, our, own, lean and chill.

But I think the real confrontation is between my latent beliefs and my newer ones, represented by Toukabri, who talks of Europe as a place where every body can be who they want; that’s to say, a liberal order of equals. But, deep down, I still entertain a belief in what Freud described as the Oedipus Complex – a latent fear that a good boy like me will use mother as a sex toy. This particular discontent and the psychic barriers it generates gets Civilization, capital “C”, going and keeps it afloat.

If you ask me if I think that, I’ll cry balderdash and say, not since 1980, at least. The real clash then is between my latent belief that Civilisation will crumble if I stop assuming that Oedipus wants to fuck his mom and my idea that every body should of right be what they want.

Here’s the nub. When all is said and done, what Oedipus is turns on who Jocasta is. Since all respect in the Oedipus Complex turns on station, not person, Oedipus, the frightened boy, is on top, near the gods who guide his destiny. On the other hand, Jocasta’s station is near the bottom: a (probable child) bride thrust into a dynastic marriage. She dutifully hands her newborn Oedipus over to her husband. The husband, also King, can murder it and perhaps avoid a sad fate for himself. Jocasta’s station is the bottom one: if Oedipus and the King can’t avoid fate, they can say “no”, because she’s meant as a uterus, Jocasta can’t; she a “does” among “haves” not to be mistaken for a “be”.

His mother just another cipher with a cunt, Oedipus can never be far from the incest he has built Civilization to avoid.

But why should all that apply to me, inspire churn in me? After all, in the civilization I (and Toukabri) believe in, Jocasta is a person – she can say “no”.

So why do I cling to the fears of Oedipus?

That question is the churn and stagger inspired in me by the respect and tenderness of Fragile. What happens to Oedipus – and to all my fellow frightened boys and our girl fellow travelers, too – when Jocasta is, is a person? … When Civilization falls, quid this Oedipus who writes? Do I lose my place? …

So, maybe it all does come down to a culture war – between my newer, truer hopes and my (unexamined) beliefs.

Mohamed Toukabri makes wonderful dance performance.

_________

I saw “The Power of the Fragile” by Mohammed Toukabri in collaboration with his mother, Mimouna (Latifa) Khamessi, featured in the Faits d’Hiver 2024 selection, at Théatre de la Bastille, 26 January 2024. A special warm nod of admiration for Diane Fourdrignier, whose insight and professionalism shine out from her dramaturgy!

Both mother and son were born in Tunisia. Before deciding to marry during a family visit to Tunis, Ms. Khamessi worked in Italy. She subsequently allowed her Italian residency rights to lapse and has never, until the production of Fragile, been able to obtain a visitor’s visa. At 15, Toukabri, got a dance scholarship for a school in Belgium; he went on to study and dance with, notably, Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker. He is now, he says, a “European citizen” (naturalized Belgian) Until recently, when she was hired as part of the cast of this production, Ms. Khamessi could never get a visitor’s visa.

Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference [By Tracy Danison]

“WHIP” by Georges Labbat. Photo © David Le Borgne

Festival Every Body, at Carreau du Temple between 9 and 13 February, bills itself as dance, performance and material art focused on the human body, the one behind the eyes and arranged by the clothes.  For the festival’s producers and sponsors, this body is the theater of the cultural mind, a place to put difference on display and let spectators and participants consider how bodies are culturally appropriated.

Participating creators are savvier, more professional and imaginative than even. If the previous two Every Body festivals foreshadow this third, performances will be especially well-thought-through and well-executed. Names include: Julien Andujar, Collectif Famille Maraboutage, Valeria Giuga, Kamilė Gudmonaitė, Marta Izquierdo Muñoz, Benjamin Kahn, Georges Labbat, Nach, Sylvain Riéjou, Alexandre Roccoli and Nina Vallon. In fact, looking at the list, I’m wondering if 2024 won’t be the year Every Body hits its stride as a project …

“Long Play Senior” by Alexandre Roccoli. Photo © Mehdi Berkouki

Discovering difference – gender, age, color, ability, sexuality – highlights much that is subtle and tough, obvious and sweet, also funny, about our cultures and perceptions. The process works by edging right up on to what a body may have thought absurd and playing it out.

For instance. Everybody, Every Body, more or less, has tits.

Right? So, we say, “man-tits”? Why “man”? Why not just “tits”? Why not “woman-tits”?

Well, because gendering suggests that if I, a man, say “My tits”, I’m jokingly complaining (sadly, in an unmanly way) about how fat I’ve become with appetite that doesn’t seem to age with me. Thus, “man tits” instead of “tits”.

Were I, on the other hand, of the woman persuasion, of original socio-biological condition as may have been, aging as fatly as may be, talking tits would be a far more complex, even dangerous, proposition.

“The World Was On Fire” by Nina Vallon. Photo © Mireille Huguet

As a “star”, for example, “tits” as subject or object, big or otherwise, might very well signal that grabbing a body’s pussy is fine work if the grabber is entitled to it; a grabber’s disappointment might well get a body a good, sound raping behind a ready-to-wear rack.

So, as I say, discovering difference highlights the subtle and tough, obvious and sweet. It’s also funny.

This time, though, I think I will go to Festival Every Body to get beyond discovering difference.

There are a couple of things that make me think redoing my critical eyes might be a good idea: the quality of Every Body 2024’s featured creators, a performance at Every Body 2023 called SHOMMES XY by Julie Lamoine and a chat I had with my Son on a lingering evening last July – our first after quite a long while.

From early days, a chat with my Son has been very much like a chat with Gargantua.

My Son asked me what, exactly, beyond currently “obvious physical differences” such as gender or skin color, what is “difference” and why do I believe something is “different” or the “same”? “Seems to me, Dad”, says this child of a new paradigm, “Most ‘difference’ is either obvious or desirable for the spectators “discovering” it or just too personal to make part of critical scrutiny.”

“Je badine avec l'amour” by Sylvain Riéjou. Photo © Jef Rabillon 

In other words, my Son suggests, who but the bribed judge treasures unequal treatment under law? Who but the psychopath embraces cruelty? Who but the charlatan claims to know the celestial mechanics of a tender heart? “The obvious, desirable and personal don’t really count for much in the big picture, Dad” he said, gulping down his pint before concluding, “If they did, there would be no bribed judges, cruelty or charlatans. Right?”.

Julie Lamoine’s SHOMMES XY featured a Down syndrome performer who was neither added into the performance nor a central part of the theme, but rather just another part in the whole performance, like a non Down syndrome performer. How the devil did she work that one out, Julie Lamoine?

In thinking about Lamoine's good trick, I realized that, ordinarily, I judge from a whole performance, the synthesis of movement in time – flow, sensibility, experience –  outward towards the particular contributions – choreography, cast, scene –  but with SHOMMES XY I focused so automatically and persistently on the Down performer that I noticed that Julie Lamoine had choreographed the difference theme in her piece so that I was forced to think more about what I do ordinarily in terms of measuring a piece of work than what I do when discovering difference.

“Dioscures” (Twins) by Marta Izquierdo Muñoz. Photo © JMC2

Finally, in looking at the creators and performances on offer for Every Body 2024, I think I see working with “difference” to make art rather than using art to represent difference – in the manner of Julie Lemoine. I know virtually all this year’s creators for work other than what will be presented at the Festival. This gives me critical reference points and guard rails as I think about and measure their work.

So, to sum it up, the knot I’d like to helplessly pick at this year is the link between what my Son called “obvious difference”, with all its socioculturopolitical baggage, and the origami of infinite difference that is the envelope and substance of both art and the individual. 

For my other appreciations of difference see “About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2022 or  “Imagine “Guérillères”: gender and the warring spirit”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2021

Happy Birthday Mr. B. "I didn't train her, she trained me!" [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Born January 22, 1904.

Choreographer George Balanchine with Mourka. Photo © Martha Swope. 

Dancing history, art and color to another state of mind [By Tracy Danison]

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d’Isenheim”, Musée d’Unterlinden. Photo © Cie Callicarpa

 

The retable d’Isenheim, the “Isenheim altarpiece”, is made up of three folded layers that open out to depict scenes of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with ordinary disease, suffering, anguish and death. Visually, the presence of Saint Anthony, a healer-hero in the Catholic-Christian pantheon and the symptoms of “Saint Anthony’s Fire” – ergot poisoning and plague: carbuncles, gangrenous swelling, madness, convulsed death – create a thematic unity.

In 1277, religious from the order of Saint Anthony set up an ergot poisoning and plague specialized hospital in “Isenheim” (nowadays written “Issenheim”). Isenheim was then, Issenheim is now, part of a string of upper-Rhine river towns, pretty much equidistant from Colmar to the north and Mulhouse to the south, all three anchored by Basel in Switzerland and Strasburg in Alsace.

Though a mere village, Issenheim retains some of its old-time shine: Prince Albert of Monaco is hereditary Lord there. Centrally located on trade routes, “Issenheim” is today in wine country but Isenheim was then in rye-growing land and, because ergot molds are especially common in rye and there was a great deal of human passage, Saint Anthony’s Fire was a big problem.  No surprise, the hospital did a booming business and came to hold many treasures, among them, the altarpiece. Painted for its chapel, the piece is a dramatically unique example of bright and colorful Renaissance painting: beautiful, visually ingenious, also shocking, revolting. New Science burgeons in the gorgeous horror, too. The lesions, carbuncles and convulsions featured are as medically realistic as disgusting.

Looted from the hospital during the French Revolution, the retable d’Isenheim is now dismounted as a separate exposition in the Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar.

And that would be that –  place, time, a little O-wow-did-you-know?! commentary – if not for Aurelie Gandit’s dance performance, meant to “open the regard, make the eye listen”.

For me, it opened a portal on a state of mind that, unless, of course, I’m concealing a lately personally accepted obscure form of first-century CE judeo-gnosticism, has long since passed away.

 

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d'Isenheim". Photo © Cie Callicarpa

The altarpiece’s Crucifying Jesus, Aurélie Gandit’s dance let me see, expertly anatomic, covered in scientifically accurate sores, is not a stern reminder of death from the unbending universal father. It is not either a commentary on the redemptive power of suffering. It is not either, as often explained today, a reminder of the universal god’s love.

Rather, that crucifying god, is a consolation by a brother, a fellow-sufferer, a sibling. Jesus is an agonizing inmate of Isenheim, just another sufferer in among the over-large family of a doting mother and a distant, if glorious, father.

Accepting pain, I realize, were no act of faith: plague-ridden Crucifying Jesus is a god like me. Anguished, we both face the gorgeously explicit horror of Saint Anthony’s Fire. Gods the Father might be out, but we little gods, Jesus and I and the other patients and the monks and the attendants are in it together, not alone.

Although Gandit’s performance notes say that she uses her body to project the strength of emotion in achieving her result, that is not my experience, or for that matter, my companion, Karine’s, either.

Though it has many figures, and notwithstanding sado-masochistic iconography, the experience of pain is just too personal to have an esthetic. Also, emotion may follow or precede pain but doesn’t seem to me (or us) to inhabit it – pain is deaf, dumb, dull, timeless, empty. I (or we) live inside pain.

To enable this other and more ancient state of mind in me, Gandit’s movement just tore a little hole in the fabric of routine.

Like an ordinary guide, she begins by describing the historic and symbolic and liturgical and esthetic ins and outs of the altarpiece. But there’s a flatness or lack of artifice to her. And her voice speeds up slightly. Her gesture becomes a little frenetic. She’s like a poor actor trying to play “hysteria”. She becomes absurd.

Then, all of a sudden, she falls to the ground.

And, when she falls to the ground, it’s a shock.

A little shock, but all shocks are a shock, are a breech in perceptual routine. And a little shock “open[ed my] regard, ma[de my] eye listen.”

__________

For another view of the experience of Aurélie Gandit’s dance performance with hisotircal artwork, see “Conundrums and sweet embrace: Aurélie Gandit’s “Visite dansée” with La Dame à la licorne”, The Best American Poetry, July 2022.