The Best American Poetry

Figuring liberation: Margaux Amoros’ “À Cru” [By Tracy Danison]

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

… Ton message à la Grande Ourse/Et la trajectoire de la course/Un instantané de velours…

    - Noir Désir, “Le Vent Nous Portera”

I’m on the mailing list for a project called Pour un atlas des figures, (“For an atlas of figures and we don’t mean just dance steps”).

Pour un atlas is run by a movement arts scholar called Mathieu Bouvier and presents itself as tracing “the meander of lines around the radiant notion of ‘figure’, a notion at the meeting point of the philosophy of art, cultural anthropology, clinical and artistic creation”.

When a body mulls that over, it works. Although, until the other day, I used to think an atlas of figures was an absurd idea, an impossibility. To my mind, an atlas was just too physical-rational a notion and figuration and figuring a figure are just too complex and too personal to trace out and distill into the five basic steps of a YouTube tutorial.

But of course, Bouvier never suggested any such thing. I’ve just had the wrong idea. As Bouvier declares, figuration and the figure are a radiant notion and their atlas is the paths and byways from where and by which their un-narrative might be grasped or grokked.   

Pour un atlas and these considerations came to my mind the other day because I got a notice for Pour an atlas in my email and because I had just experienced, and enjoyed, too, the dance performance À Cru (“Raw”) by Margaux Amoros.

A Cru, a duo featuring herself and peer performer Jeanne Alechinsky, turned out, for me, at least, to be “all about” figure, figuring and figuration, showing them to exist in the time of an intentional, but un-narrative movement, as quantum, not as evanescent.

Amoros’ intention was:

Ayant fait le constat sans appel de leur domestication avancée, deux femmes décident de partir en quête de ce qui en elles résiste encore. «  Qui sont-elles sous les vieilles peaux mortes de leur subordination ? À quoi ressemblent-elles quand leur image se met à trembler de l’intérieur ? » Dans un espace hanté par la présence d'un musicien, elles viennent écouter la nécessité de faire alliance avec une sensualité indisciplinée. / Having understood their state of advanced domestication, two women decide to explore themselves to find that part of themselves that still resists. “Who are they under the dead skin of their subordination? What are they like when the image of themselves quakes from the inside?” In a space haunted by the presence of a musician, they listen to the need to ally themselves with a sensuality without bounds.

Here’s what I (believe I) heard and saw happen with À Cru:

A live guitar in a stage left catwalk is doing broad chords with plenty of dash and wah-wah; throughout sound rather follows or accompanies than leads movement. On stage, two women with what good old Anthony Trollope called “womanly” bodies; at center stage, clothed as womanly women, they are hand-in-hand for movements that range from jerky to moon-walky through to carefully experimental to smoother, stretchy, confident gesture.

At the point at which each of the womanly women seems to descry a distinct/defined individual dance, they loose hands to evolve in parallel.

One plants her feet and focuses her movement and emotion on her thrust-up pubis; I think of a samurai: her clitoris and upper vulva seemingly bulging, her posture and look, a “universal” figuring of “power”, “empowered”. Meanwhile, the other woman, referencing her partner by the contrast of movement, figuring her personal balance, showing herself within herself her body elegance: she stretches her limbs, projects a figuration of the place and sense of each bone and muscle within its whole.

The result is a broad figuration of the two women together gels in my eye – they share an evolved interior or exterior?

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

The duo passes into a movement of contact … In this contact, they are not so much mirrors as searcher-outers of one-another, experiencing found contact. For me, at least, the piece ends inside this crescendo of contact, without denouement:  once liberated, a body lives free, not so?

Back to Pour un atlas.

Figures, by my lights as now seen through À Cru, must necessarily be the collective biography of people figuring and figured. The figuration within that biography recreates the tissue of being-there-with, or the “un-narrative” experience, that enables the sensibility that in turn enables a spectator to enter into Imagination or, as we may say, be sensible of the quantum space a body actually inhabits.

An analogy to what I am thinking of here as “figuration” could be the visual experience of those mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, stimuli that shove the viewer into a “non-past”, say, one peopled with ineffable eternally extant personalities instead of into the “historical (or narrative) past” where each personality has some sort of role in “what happens ‘next’”.

And though Dance is the art that builds, carries and enables figuration, there are webs and webs of it in figuring ordinary life.

I am on the Pour un atlas mailing list because – well before I experienced Margaux Amoros’ À Cru and felt the force of her mastery of figuration – because of my admiration for any people who have understood that dance is the primary art. Loïc Touzé figures among very many admirable contributors of Pour un atlas; I have been in love with Touzé through my experience of his talk-memory dance, Je suis lent (“I am slow”). In my memory, for the record, the Lent I was there with rolls out in a place that photo evidence shows not to be that place or even the time of year or year of its production.  All the same, it figures true.

And what is this “love” if not a figuration of daily living, a web in a web of un-sayable figure, figuring and figuration?

Without any intention, by some ordinary quantum symbiosis or another, Touzé’s Lent figures my karmic Patronus. That is, the Down syndrome boy, strong back and sweet temper, for the term of natural life, bound hand, heart and foot to an aging industrial dishwasher. Most everybody who gets a glimpse of the bound figure are figuring it as all for the best. And that holds the bound boy down, ‘though, from time to time, a body with doubts briefly glimmers through the steam and clatter, bucking the bound boy up.

I’ve been figuring the bound boy figuration for years. He has washed many dishes for me and never said a word. Go figure.

_____________________

“À Cru” is Margaux Amoros’ first choreography, a duo It played at the Etoile du nord as part of the “Avis des turbulences” new works program. I saw it on 28 September 2023.

Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Songlines” by Marco Berrettini. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The Ballet de Lorraine opened its 2023-2024 season at the beginning of November with Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques (“Mountains: ambiance dances”) and Marco Berrettini’s Songlines (“Dream tracks”), both of them visually lovely and perceptually stimulating.

“Visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” makes me think how much more like science than esthetics dance experience is. More like peering through a telescope than, say, a kaleidoscope.

For a telescope, you’ve got to acquire a steady hand and agile eye before you can see anything at all. Whatever you discover after learning not jiggle is dependent on previous experience from within and without yourself, along with intense, very fragile and very fickle observation. Watch out! Looking for god-knows-what one deep winter’s night in Upstate New York, my Dad got lost up there and got frost bite.

After seeing Danses atmosphériques and Songlines, I had the good luck to chat informally over dinner with Petter Jacobsson, the Ballet’s director, and Thomas Caley, the artistic researcher. Jacobsson and Caley are a life couple. Beyond their affinities, Jacobsson has been insistently, consistently and publicly affirming Caley’s role as his indispensable creative partner throughout his more than 10-year tenure at the Ballet.

After about half hour’s sit down with Caley, I understood Jacobsson on both heads.

The 2023-2024 season in Nancy is the last for the creative couple. Instantly forever is the working title of their goodbye piece. It opens on 7 March 2024 and runs until the 12 March 2024 at the Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy, with Marco da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia, also a new creation, sharing the bill.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Speaking of Instantly forever, Songlines, Mountains and personal and creative partnerships, and by the way, my thanks to Robert Weissberg. He was an assistant professor at Skidmore College. Back in 1972, he gave me boxes of books to take along to the Army with me.

When he gave me them, he said that taken together the books pretty much made up the sum total of a liberal education for our times. I’ve discovered that’s pretty much true, too; Hegel and Vico are pretty much in the ballpark on politics and history, Candide pretty much on life and Jung pretty much on experience. To add to this existing knowledge, during supper, Caley & Jacobsson recommended David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book begins with a quote from the Undiscovered Self: something like, the moment is right for a change of civilizations.

In my small experience of it, Caley & Jacobsson’s choreographic work has two striking features, which I should tell you about to fog up your telescope if you chance to see Instantly Forever.

The first feature is an un-narrative concern around what we call “time”. The second feature is…  – I want to say executed individuation of the choreographic artists involved, viz., Jung, viz., Dawn.  This want-to comes down to saying that, so far, walking away from any Ballet de Lorraine performance, I feel like I’ve seen each artist – experienced something beyond words that honors the un-narrative they are mapping for the choreography designer and spectators.

I can sum up my experience of Jacobsson & Caley’s work this way. At the core are firmly-grasped – “un-narrative” or “movement-only” – themes (such as “time”), and a thought-through choreography shared, shaped and executed by trusted fellow artists on a visually pleasing set.

So, no surprise that “visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” is my take on Berrettini’s Songlines and Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques. Jacobsson & Caley hired them, after all.

Berrettini’s dance note makes Songlines seem like there’s some civilizational or even political story in the dance, which at first put me off – dance and politics hardly ever can mix for me. Previously known to me for meta-satire performance, Berrettini writes that he crafted the choreography after reading Bruce Chatwin’s spiritual travelogue, The Songlines. He also cites the odd coincidence of the farmer’s eternal dissatisfaction with an imperfect world and the nomad’s satisfaction with a perfect one.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

It turns out, though, that the choreographer is just coming to grips with “space” through the complex tradition of Australia’s first peoples’ space-time maps – called “songlines”. Berretini’s approach is to recall the first peoples’ successful concept to support a dance experience of his movement-only theme: space.

His choreography gets at it first by visual separation then by encounter and group actions. In the opening movement, the artists, all dressed in light-sensitive pastel colors, enter the set together from a single off-center point.

I experience them as spreading over the set space like a (lapping) tide on a beach. The movement evokes the familiar defining contraries of “land, sea, horizon”, which also fills its now three dimensions with people. The set becomes a place.

With a music that minds its own business, establishing presence within a diffusely lit place, spectators see the artists variously as in one of three of five possible colors – blue, yellow, rose, green, orange – as they encounter one another, establish a flow of meeting, take on personality, individuate. And just in case a spectator is getting into a rut: a sudden rain of helium-filled rocks/meteors/turds/chocolate truffles from “above”.  Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, the spectator, a stimulating experience of the imagination of space.

With an intention to show dance as “a happy accident”, and keeping in mind that it must take a great deal of doing, Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques goes at the perception of space, too, but as “ambiance”. The challenge for Sierras’ artists is to figure spectators mountains that move spectators, or, perhaps, spectators moving figurative mountains, or both – in short, something that exists only in a body’s perception.

Di Stefano succeeds his dance with a choreography articulating around appearance and disappearance, along with continuous shading of light and (movement) energy.

In a first movement, Sierras’ intent artists, costumed in black and flesh,  pass in and out of the set space, then flow into and against each other within it, find distances, measures, relationships, limits.

As with Songlines, music that minds its own business backgrounds Sierra’s dim but changing light and tints and, especially, the artist movement. A unique red individual – a sun? – finishes a the unique and autonomous rhythm that now defines the place …  And, step right up, spectator! Experience space as place as its ambiance, its feeling, space that feels as real as a Mussorgsky Bald Mountain, a Hokusai Mount Fuji or a Richard Brautigan Big Sur! Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, spectator, quite a new ambiance.

I’ll miss having Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine at the other end of my dance telescope.

______________

Articles discussing Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine referenced above

Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #2: a tale of sentiment and feeling [by Tracy Danison]

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine 2023-2024 performance calendar: Nancy, On Tour

François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Dance performer, choreographer and director François Lamargot says his recent “dance-theater” piece, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie, comes down to his view that our civilization has generated a “handicap of the heart” that blinds its members to the destruction it (the handicap) provokes within and around it.

When Lamargot talks about a “handicap of the heart”, he means impaired hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling of the here and now: non-development of the ordinary senses.  He thinks that when these ordinary powers are weak, the world within a body, the individual or personality, becomes a plaything of what Sting called “the poets, priests and politicians …. whose logic ties you up and rapes you”.

Without a within nourished from the ordinary senses, Lamargot thinks, a body loses herself or himself in a breathless spiral of passive reaction to the world without. Asked if J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie … is a study of the connections between us and the world or of our disconnection from it, Lamargot affirms, “Disconnection”. He says that, in the end, what he wants to suggest by showing the disconnection is that something other (than the handicapped heart and the madness) it produces is possible. He wants to get beyond discourse, to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to get across this other sensibility.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Son of a film projectionist and a stage actress, a neighborhood hip hopper with academic dance credentials, as a kid François Lamargot started acting with his mom at the now defunct Théâtre de Ménilmontant collective. He came to dance – classic, jazz and contemporary, with parallel specialties in break and house (freestyle personal expressive) – because he felt more at ease with his body. Also, he says, dancing makes him feel more able to express and show meaning.

Since his early days, Lamargot has created, performed, taught and encouraged dance performance in and from his native Paris 20ème to the Comoros Islands, from Lyon to Haiti and Gabon, from Marseille to New Caledonia.

Lamargot is intellectually and professionally in his element across the culture spectrum. He is as comfortable working on multidisciplinary career development with young people at the Jeune Ballet Européen as he is doing tailor-made creation for the reference hip-hop festivals Kalypso and Karavel.  Ethics and right action in daily life are important to Lamargot. His reference points include the principles of Taoism and the practice of the antique Zen masters Dôgen and Lin-Tsi along with the outlook of the writer Marguerite Duras and the precepts of the Argentine painter Luis Ansa and the contemporary social activist Henri Gougaud.

So, how does Lamargot get all his life experience and philosophy into a dance performance?

First off, by imagining then executing a form of dance. When I saw a first-draft production of J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais du Chaillot) in 2022,  I thought of it as “cinematized dance-theater”, even as “musical drama”. I still think that’s a pretty understandable description.

Lamargot says that, taken together, what I could experience as “musical drama” is for him a distinct genre that hybridizes hip hop and specific elements of contemporary dance, especially danse contact (“contact improvisation” or “body empathy dance”).

In any case, he says he’s been instinctively looking for points of fusion among his different dance practices all along. “Movement has no genre frontiers”, he says, adding that there is, anyhow, a lot of complementarity in dance performance figures and forms. For instance, [the foot-fluttering movement called] petite batterie in classical dance “has a rhythm that closely resembles that in house dance…”

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

These days, in any case, Lamargot doesn’t think much about the originating genre of a move or figure. He prefers to think in terms of a movement’s visual quality: “roundness, fluidity, impact, density, amplitude, explosiveness” and a movement’s effect on the spectator. 

J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … figures both dream and reality – a doubling that mobilizes Lamargot’s whole performance toolbox in the service of “showing” this sensibility of “disconnection” while holding out the possibility for another way of living.

The piece is played out on a set that recalls the feeling one has at the Palais de Glace, Baroque elegance that has lost its cultural moorings, is sliding toward hopeless forgotten-ness. What counts from there, he says, is, especially, theatricality and the astute use of video.

On set, video “translates as a mirror in which a given character also exists”.

As a genre, Lamargot observes, hip hop is powerful theatrical tool … “very forward, very much on the attack, very effective visually”. It often uses, he continues, set-piece situations to induce emotions in characters. These emotions can then be picked up by spectators as “sensibility” rather than as “story-line”.

Forms and riffs of contemporary dance provide attitude. For J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie,Lamargot is thinking in particular of danse contact. Dance contact operates around the receptive body, the body connected to its world. In the performers on stage this receptiveness, as in t’ai chi or karate, translates as strength and potentiality rather than power and action…

In the Paris region, you can catch J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie:

- 3 and 4 February 2024 at the Suresnes Cités Danse festival

Want to be among the world’s first certified choreographers? Check out La Fabrique de la Danse [By Tracy Danison]

Théophile Bensusan (l.), creation entrepreneur, dance performer, La Fabrique de la Danse, Paris. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

“Orianne Vilmer has energy”. That’s what comes to mind as I am sitting down for the chat. Maybe it’s just that her name reminds me of the excellent Oriana Fallacci, interviewer of almost all the egregious men-of-power of the 20^th century. Like Fallacci, Vilmer’s radiates that kind of natural-born energy and wit old Father William in the Lewis Carroll nursery rhyme has. I have the feeling that, if she chooses, like the unsinkable father, she can successfully clarify a quantum paradox with a bon mot while idly balancing an eel on the tip of her nose.

Indeed, there are proofs that Vilmer does have her wits about her and is, in fact, as energetic, cultivated, and capable as my first impression suggests.

After all, I am talking to her because she’s the co-founder and guiding spirit – along with the veteran choreographer and dancer Christine Bastin – of La Fabrique de la Danse (“The Dance Factory”), a Paris dance school with a unique learning proposition.

For instance, as of this writing, as far as either La Fabrique, or I, can determine, the school is the only one in Paris, in the whole world, where you can learn the ins and outs of the choreographer’s métier and get official certification for it. That’s because, as of July, France’s national skills and competences register, Répertoire national des certifications professionnelles, RNCP, has included those required in a choreographer. La Fabrique is the institution with a curriculum that meets the requirements.

 

© La Fabrique de la Danse

 

I think it’s safe to say that Vilmer is a dance performer with a scientific background and serious business experience rather than some other way around.

In her school years, she took up classic dance and earned praise and prizes for it. Then, at the Paris Conservatory, she practiced contemporary dance for two years under the eyes of teachers such as Peter Goss, Joëlle Mazet and Susan Alexander.

She then turned away from dance training to prepare for life widely, taking degrees in engineering and mathematics – France’s educative equivalents of, say, in US terms, Harvard law with a stint in a graduate school of politics. She followed on with work in international corporate management, where, among other things, she contributed proudly and personally, she says, to ESG charter projects.

While in the corporate web Vilmer successfully kept up her dance. In fact, in a recent conversation with Christine Bastin, the latter went out of her way more than once to emphasize that Vilmer is a talented dance performer and choreographer. Indeed, in December, she’ll premier M51, a dance performance for 54 persons (in which she will perform), co-written with La Fabrique associate Emmanuelle Simon, with a digital scene by Damien Serban and original music by Baptiste Lagrave. As I say, energy, wit.

In 2010, Vilmer founded the amateur dance troupe Danse en Seine, whose stated mission is to “re-invent” the concept of amateur dance and dream “ambitious dreams”. In 2013, the troupe wanted to perform Gueule de Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), Christine Bastin’s dance performance for five created for the 1992 Lyon Biennale de la danse.

That meeting seems to have been one of minds. In 2015, Vilmer and Bastin set up La Fabrique. Vilmer became president, using her energy wit and experience to do the necessary entrepreneurship and general management. Bastin became artistic director, contributing her choreography skills and experience to building and refining the school’s unique offering.

The idea of La Fabrique then, as now, was/is to turn out a “finished product”, a skilled dance performer, surely, but also a competent and efficacious creator.

It turns out that, as in many other contemporary endeavors, say, independent journalism or scriptwriting, creativity is not sufficient to a dance performer’s professional success. A body has to produce, too: administrate, manage and communicate.

When she speaks of educational goals, Vilmer says La Fabrique looks to train up “creation entrepreneurs”. She insists on, underlines, emphasizes the word “entrepreneur” as opposed to “manager”). She then describes La Fabrique as a “choreography incubator”, saying the heart of dance performance is “creation, a process very much personal to the creator, that needs to find nourishment and support from the outside” …

In other words, in choreography, it’s not just fulfilled intentions and figures that lead to success but also, as in other undertakings, people, lights, sound, stage and box office! So, even the most inner-directed dance performance auteurneeds to develop the arts of the entrepreneur: finding the resources and gaining support of others for the dance project.

A successful choreographer, Vilmer says, is a dance performance auteur who understands how to be an entrepreneur of dance creation. That’s why La Fabrique’s certification cursus aims to package it as training in “creation entrepreneurship”: understanding better how a dance performer creates, how they identify and analyze their needs and seek out the aids and supports that enable choreographic production ...  

… Why. Yes. I think so, too.

Orianne Vilmer and her La Fabrique de la Danse certainly do offer a real learning opportunity.

The pre-requisites and conditions of La Fabrique’s choreography cursus are analogous to a continuing-education MBA. For detailed information, click Fabrique de la Danse or call Ilyana Koura, the school’s personal development coordinator, during business hours (GMT+1) at (+33) 184 79 4534.

For more information on the professional status of choreographers, contact Chorégraphes Associé.e.s., France’s choreographer’s union

What is dance, what has it got to do with us and why? [By Pauline Tremblay]

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Introduction

Some years ago, I was in the habit of going to weekly public presentations on psychoanalysis. I would lose myself an hour or two in the rococo webs of a presenter’s case study, which they would lard with literary logics backed by vocal dramatics. It was an entertaining and instructive way to learn about contemporary psychoanalysis. Also, I would often hear some word or notion that would give me pause and, more than once, even make me sit up wide-eyed.

I was reminded of these experiences by Pauline Tremblay’s satirical slide-presentation performance piece, Corps social, corps dansant. The basic shtick of it is Tremblay’s presenter marching determinedly into recondite research only to wander off into an increasingly impatient detachment from the over-complex talk-talk, thus mirroring the general experience of too many real-life slide presentations. I chuckled and snickered, even guffawed, through Tremblay’s fine performance of a well-written and pretty spot-on satire.

But, from the moment the presenter explains her sense of what dance is and what it has to do with us and why – that is, almost from the very beginning of the performance –  I had a sit-up-wide-eyed experience. In my mind’s eye, a figure of a “porous self”, a self that is a vague outline set into an infinite overlap of an infinite number of porous “self-defining” outlines set against a vast coherence of being there with. It kept me sitting thoughtfully in my seat after the performance wound up, perched on my shoulder, whispered in my ear, as I rode my bike homewards.

In the text, there’s no trace of the figure of the "porous self" I describe just above.

Just after the short biography is an extract from the notes Pauline Tremblay used as both prop and script during her performance of Corps social, corps dansant, 28 September 2023, as part of Étoile du nord’s Autumn festival, Avis de turbulences. A translation into English follows Tremblay’s original text. 

Pauline Tremblay, dancer, performer, writer

With a consistent slant towards the off-beat, Pauline Tremblay’s creations straddle the frontier between performance, theater and dance, as well as between fact and fiction, the private and the public, between word and deed. Working as a dancer and performer since 2008, Tremblay trained in classical dance at Nantes and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy, esthetics, dance theory and therapy from the University of Paris 8, haut lieu of France’s post-modernist theory and analysis. Tremblay became an associate of the Gaëlle Bourges dance performance company in 2018. In addition to Corps Social, Corps Dansant, Tremblay’s recent creations include the dance performances One two One Two and Après alien. A new production tentatively entitled Trio pour une danseuse, une électroacousticienne et un.e batteur.se will see the stage in 2024. – Tracy Danison

 

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Corps social, corps dansant – Pauline Tremblay

… 2) LE CORPS DANSANT

« Dans un premier temps, de quelle danse parle-t-on ? Danse dite « primitive », « traditionnelle », « folklorique », « danse de couple », « danse moderne », « danse contemporaine », « danse de création » ... ? Et d’ailleurs, sont-elles si éloignées dans leurs approches du corps ?
L’histoire de la danse nous enseigne que c’est à partir du moment où la danse a pris conscience de sa dimension sociale et politique, c'est-à-dire que c'est à partir du moment où le corps dansant ne se résume pas aux différentes figures que traverse le danseur, qu’elle a tissé des liens avec son époque et que la danse a véritablement fait sa place parmi les autres arts.

1. Une place particulière au sein des arts

En effet, La danse est un art particulier qui ne peut dissocier le sujet de son objet :
Le danseur ne peut pas poser sa danse à côté de lui et la contempler. Le danseur fait coïncider une image intérieure, une sensation intérieure avec le regard extérieur. Et la danse émerge alors dans cet espace intermédiaire. Ainsi, autant dans sa production que dans sa réception, elle ne peut pas être en dehors du regard que l’on porte sur elle. Le corps dansant serait donc un catalyseur du corps social, du corps politique et potentiellement du corps institutionnel. Et sans doute l’art le plus à même de l’évoquer, d’en dire quelque chose.

Deux axes d'observation se dessinent : on peut se placer soit du point de vue de ce que la danse peut représenter symboliquement sur une scène en terme d’idéologie, soit du point de vue ce qu’elle comporte d’effet immédiat de par sa puissance de mobilisation kinesthésique.
Ce qu'on entend par kinesthésique  : c’est le pouvoir empathique, la façon dont chacun perçoit, en lui, par un processus de transfert et d’identification très fort, le mouvement de l’autre. Ce n'est pas du tout mystique ce que je suis en train de dire : cela a pu notamment être mis en évidence par la preuve de l'existence de neurones miroirs.

1. Le corps dansant = Le corps dansant et le corps regardant la danse“

• Le corps qui danse

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Qu’en est-il du corps dansant ? Est-ce que, parce qu’il est dansant, ce corps échappe à la contrainte sociale ? Ou est-ce une utopie ?
Le corps dansant est pris dans une dialectique de libération et de prise de pouvoir du corps social sur lui. La danse est un formidable moyen de libération individuelle et collective autant qu’un moyen de coercition individuel et collectif. 

• Avant d’être considérés comme des instruments performants, le mouvement et la danse déploient une spatialité, une temporalité, un imaginaire, des éprouvés conscients et inconscients, c’est à dire une subjectivité. Certes.
• Mais ce corps, qui cherche à s’émanciper de sa condition de base, en déjouant la gravité par exemple, s'engage bien dans une performance technique, dans la recherche d'une certaine virtuosité qui implique une maîtrise, voire un quasi dressage, du corps naturel. Donc il y a bien une dimension productiviste du corps dansant, qui implique une dépense d’énergie, un effort, un travail….
• Le corps qui regarde le corps qui danse. Comme on l’a dit, la danse est aussi indissociable de son évènementialité.Porter la danse au regard de l’autre c’est donc l’inscrire dans un espace social, public, collectif, politique. Elle pose d’emblée la question du regard du public …

Mais de quel public parle-ton?

S’agit-il d’une identité sociale, bourgeoise ou populaire ? Le spectacle instaure-t-il une entité, une communauté, un être-ensemble, une communion au sein des spectateurs ? Le lieu de la représentation devient-il un lieu de recueillement, de rassemblement, à construire ou à détruire d'ailleurs ? Ou le public reste-t-il une masse hétérogène d’individus éparses ? Avec comme seul dénominateur commun le fait d’être enfermé ici et maintenant ? "

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Translation

Corps social, corps dansant by Pauline Tremblay

… 2) THE BODY AT DANCE

First off, what dance are we talking about? “Primitive” dance, “traditional” dance, “folklore” dance, “couple” dance, “modern”, “contemporary”, “original” dance? And at that, are these so far from each other in their approach to the body?

The history of dance tells us that, from the moment when dance becomes conscious of its social and political dimension, that is, from the moment when the body at dance cannot be described by the different figures through which the dancer passes, it has become part of its time and that it has made itself a real place among the other arts.

1. A special place among the arts

Dance is an art that cannot dissociate subject from object: The dancer cannot put their dance on the floor next to them to contemplate it. The dancer aligns an interior image, an interior feeling with exterior view. And it is from the intermediate space that the alignment creates that dance emerges. Thus, as much in its production as in its reception, dance cannot exist outside its exterior perception. The body at dance, thus, is a catalyst for the body in society, the body in politics and, potentially, of the institutional body. And, doubtless, dance is the art the best placed to point to, also to comment, the body,

Two ways of looking at the body at dance emerge. We may take the point of view of either what dance may represent symbolically in a context in terms of ideology or the point of view of what dance has of immediate effect through the power of kinesthetic mobilization.

What is meant here by “kinesthetic” is empathic capacity, that is, the way in which each perceives within them self, through the very strong transfer and identification process, the movement of the other. What Is meant here has nothing of the mystical; we could easily demonstrate the validity of the process described by pointing to the existence of mirror neurons.

1. The Body at dance = the dancing body + the body looking at the dance

• The dancing body

What about the dancing body? Does it escape from social constraints because it is dancing? Or is this a fantasy?

The dancing body operates as a dialectic of liberation from and submission to the forms of body in society. Dance is as formidable a means of personal and collective liberation as it of personal and collective coercion.

• Before they can be tools, movement and dance must deploy spatial, temporal and perceptual contexts, conscious and unconscious proofs, that is, subjectivity.
• But the body, which looks to emancipate itself from its primal state by, for example, defying gravity, engages with performance technique in the search for a certain virtuosity, which implies mastery, even near domination, of the natural body. There is, thus, a productivist dimension to the dancing body, which implies, after all, energy, effort, work…
• The body that looks on the dancing body.

As has been said, dance cannot be separated from its context. Bringing dance to a spectator is to put dance into public, social, collective and political space. Off the bat it poses the question of public perception…

But what public are we talking about?

Are we talking about a bourgeois or working class social identity? Does dance performance install an entity, a community, being-together, a communion in spectators? Does the performance space become a space for mediation, for gathering; also, is it to construct or demolish? Or do spectators remain a heterogeneous mass of scattered individuals with the sole common denominator being to be shut in together in a particular here and now? – Tracy Danison

Something like opera on a rocket ship: creating for space that talks back [By Tracy Danison]

Luara Raio’s “Apocalypso”, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia. Photo © Rachel Pimentel

A couple of years back I wrote about the challenge of art performance – Deploying original intentions and creative potential – at Lafayette Anticipations, the well-known visual and performance art venue in Paris’ Marais district.

All Lafayette’s installations and performances happen within what is, essentially, an elaborate sculpture of space by architect Rem Koolhaas. Basically, Lafayette is a large three-layer light well with viewing platforms.

If you’ve lived in a flatiron or a round building or had to renovate “atypical space” to live in, experience or instinct gives you some measure of Lafayette’s ongoing technical and esthetic challenge, interesting in itself. More broadly, whether doing dance performance or living life, the space it takes place in is a primordial feature of it; we are in an existential exchange with our surroundings.

A space can be mute: choreography that works fine in somebody’s basement won’t necessarily work at Opéra Bastille. A space can talk back: current life choreographies are transforming the natural environment from an indifferent ally into an existential threat.

Mute or responsive, exchange with space is an existential imposition. But both authentic living and art require will and intention, so finding a way to dialogue, deliberately shaping and grafting intentions into given space, is essential to creative success. Because Lafayette’s “space sculpture” has so much relentless will and intention built into it – Rem Koolhaas is always talking back –  it forces a spectator – at least, it has always forced me – to think hard about how a creator/choreographer/performer achieves dialogue from exchange.

Ivan Cheng. In situ. Photo Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations © Timboli

So far, whether for installations or performance, Lafayette’s three-layer light well sculpture has been made to work pretty well. For instance, both as experience and brain-teaser, the articulation of light and dark for Agnes Gryczkowska’s Spring 2023 installation, Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual, did the trick very well. And the space positively threw itself into its role as a big city pocket park for performance creator Lina Lapelyte’s The Mutes.

Strong choreographers at Lafayette can and do create dialogue through force of artistic intention. I’m thinking of Noé Soulier’s Mouvement sur Mouvement. Strong performers can and do master the space with a performance that creates a parallel space, resonating like an opera in a rocket ship. I’m thinking of Dorothée Munyaneza’s A cappella. Both performances featured in Echelle Humaine 2022.

At moments, too, Lafayette’s space can make for wonderful, one-of-a-kind success. My heart still beats hard when I think of watching dance performer Yuika Hashimoto’s re-creation of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic Violin Phase, which was followed by the choreographer’s de-creation of same at the bottom of that light well. Unforgettable stuff and only possible inside Koolhaas’ sculpture.

Essentially, Echelle Humaine 2023, which opens this Friday, 15 September, is challenging all its dance performance and installation creators to work deliberately within its unique performance space. Using public workshops, creator meet & greets, installations and choreographies, it has explicitly built its program around how that is, or can be, done.

The program is heavy on visualness and concepts. Installations include Alix Boillot’s Scénographie potentielle, a blue potato that inhabits it’s given space at the top of the light well and Tai Shani’s Reading room, which accents (her) recurring motifs. Ivan Cheng’s Clarities, is a purpose-built active installation-performance using video to satirize the creative process,  Luara Raio’s Apocalypso, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia, and Paul Maheke’s  L'Origine de la mort, featuring Alyssa "Ledet" Dillard, are both dance-performance duets, the former themed around cultural colonization and the latter around on the thinness of the lines between perceptions.

So let’s see how the challenge is met.

Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results [by Tracy Danison]

Betty Tchmonga, “Mascarades”. Photo © Queila Fernandez

Our way to measure or perceive things changes from day to day, so naturally things change even if we can’t, don’t want to, or have senses and capacities inadequate to talk about what is happening:

 Muon g-2 experiment reinforces surprise result, setting up physics ‘showdown’ The difference of g from 2 — or g minus 2 — can be attributed to the muon’s interactions with particles in a quantum foam that surrounds it. These particles blink in and out of existence and, like subatomic “dance partners,” grab the muon’s “hand”, changing the way the muon interacts with the magnetic field. The Standard Model incorporates all known “dance partner” particles and predicts how the quantum foam changes g. But there might be more. Physicists are excited about the possible existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles that contribute to the value of g-2 and would open the window to exploring new physics. - uchicagonews, 11 August 2023

Muons and measures and the cosmic randomness of dance partners is at least part of what was behind my post, Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal. For me, Nathalie Béasse’s theater represents a shift away from narrative theater towards performance theater: like visual art, pointing towards sense rather than story.

The shift may have come about as a result of Béasse’s beginnings as a visual artist combined with a remarkable native insight into the physical mechanics of psychology.

However it may actually be for Béasse, sense, or Imagination, is what I think Dance, capital D, is all about, so I think the public success of her work is Sign and Portent of a developing un-narrative or performance way to do what we usually call theater.

The fascination with the un-narrative is the quantum foam shaping my optics on the noteworthy change of management at the Théâtre de la Bastille. Claire Dupont, 42, recognized as founder and director of Prémisses, especially for her work in developing performing arts through inclusion, has replaced Jean-Marie Hordé, 75, known for rescuing and then developing theater (live performance) culture, after better than 30 years of more than good theater and dance. With Dupont’s accession, Théâtre de la Bastille has also become publicly operated, part city of Paris and the region, part ministry of culture. Le Monde calls the appointment of Dupont “audacious”, but the 40-something’s professional career objectives and the government’s policy ends seem to me to dovetail famously. The ministry certainly saw that and saw, too, that her success thus far signals she’s serious about the future.

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

The change is noteworthy for me because of the g-2 element of it, as I say, but also because of a personal element. When I first came to France, I made it my business to see all the classic plays and all the then current ones I could. My aim was to get a handle on the society I was living in – that seemed to be one good way to go forward. My main but not only theaters of action were Comédie française, Théâtre de la Colline and Théâtre de la Bastille. After a performance of The Master & Margarita, I decided I’d had enough of theater, and of words words words in general; I’d got all the handle that was possible for me to get. I can say now that my life accomplishments so far include sitting through Racine’s oeuvre, seeing the Great Wall of China and realizing that Gorbatchev had really read Crime & Punishment. All that is no mean feat. And what comes next is of interest.

In addition to the personal, the management change at Bastille is significant in a couple of public and social ways. First, because generational; this Claire Dupont could be my own daughter; I might have been at school with Hordé; this change is happening everywhere and increasingly. Too, it’s significant as politics and public policy. In a country where culture is seen as the basis for social cohesion and not its result, it’s value in terms of inclusion and intégration will weigh more, maybe than its public esthetic success. And that esthetic success is what concerns me most.

So, what stands out to me from what I know this far is how clear and coherently Claire Dupont has been about her task of creating a framework for intelligent, popular, inclusive living performance. Her terms of art on paper just seem to make so much logical sense. Her plans for going forward, at least as I can make them out in her project description and season program, strike me as sensibly modest and well-paced.

First off, in the declarative, Dupont writes that her theater will use contemporary spoken French. This suggests two things: that she realizes that language as spoken by today’s creators is an accessory to performance and she’s serious about developing writing today.  Second, she’s declares that she’s introducing what she calls “parliamentary” artistic management. And so it is that her announced way of going about it shows she actually knows what “parliamentary” means: her MPs among them represent enough serious “lobbies”, skills, competences, experiences and general artistic sérieux to set up and staff an all-genre dance performance theater. Which is, I suppose, is the idea.

 

Cie De Hoe, “Le Nouvel Homme”. Photo © Koen Broos

From my reading between the lines, Dupont, among other things, has a particular care for people who know how to work with others and who learn the ropes of a project through experience of it.

Gurshad Shaheman, who arrived in France as a 12 year old refugee from Iran, trained as a Persian-French translator at Paris VIII, as well as an actor in a public-university associated regional acting school in Marseille. Shaheman has been working since 2004 in every conceivable aspect of live performance: performer, director, caberetist playwright; he has apparent intellectual and emotional heft on migrant and LGBTQ issues.

Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida come from Catalonia and are currently working together on the performance Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota (“Bounce, bounce: in your face”), themed around ordinary violence. Mateus trained as an actor and journalist and now calls herself a multidisciplinary artist. To begin her performance career, she joined Collectiu General Elèctrica at its founding in 1996. The mission of the Barcelona performance collective was to break the barriers between performance, theater and dance. Throughout her career, as she is now with Quim Tarrida, Agnès Mateus has worked in co-work and/or co-contribution projects. Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota is a second collaboration. Tarrida is a materials and visual artist who now defines himself as a performance artist.

Betty Tchomanga, whose constituency is Dance performance, was born in the west of France in 1989. Educated and trained in Bordeaux and Angers, Tchomanga has lately been having good success with public and critics alike. She seems at the beginning of an interesting maturity as a choreographer and performer after working with the exceptional choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas since 2014. Tchmonga strikes me as a creator whose concern is, on the model of the dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza, sensibility, creating atmosphere, reaching toward the sacred and spiritual in the material.

Bastille’s MPs will be on campaign in season 2023-2024, so spectators will get a sense of how they do creation as well as sit through performances the same artists have had a hand in choosing. In addition to the wide variety of performance habitually offered, spectators can savor Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Fortresses, featuring members of his own family; Agnés Mateus’ and Quim Tarrida’s Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota, which explores the same ambient violence that Barbie reported during a recent visit to reality; Betty Tchomanga’s Mascarades, incarnating the energies of Mami Wata, voodoo earth mother.

In succeeding years, Dupont’s plan is, each artist will develop individual thematics or performance lines to follow.

In addition to Tchmonga’s Mascarades, the 2023-2024 season’s dance offer will figure dancer and choreographer  Laura Bachman, born 1994, veteran of the Paris Opéra and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cie Rosas, doing Ne me touchez pas(“Don’t touch me”) a feminine duo. Mohamed Toukabri, born in Tunis in 1990, a street breaker from Belgium in the 2020s come to contemporary dance performance through Academie Internationale de danse in Paris and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. program, performs The Power of the fragile, with his mother ; Nach (Anne-Marie Van), who came to dance in her 20s through Krump, the psychotherapeutic variant of break dance, on-the-hoof apprenticeship and just plain creative intelligence, has created her own take on contemporary dance (La Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne 2023 #2: I got that hip hop feeling [By Tracy Danison]. Her solo contribution is from 2017, the first of her work I saw : Cellule, around freedom in the body self.

The energy and the g-stuff are in place. Switch on the collider.

Click for complete Théâtre de la Bastille Performance Calendar 2023-2024

Click for Cie Nathalie Béasse Performance Calendar in France & Belgium 2023-2024

Amy Swanson: Keeping on keeping on, Duncan dancing and the Old Woman of Tiritaka [by Tracy Danison]

Dancer and choreographer Amy Swanson on the set for Mehdi Kerkouche’s Portrait at La Scala Provence, 15 July 2023. Photo © Kilian Vérin

So why do today’s troisième âge cohorts keep on, or at least try to, keep on dancing? After all, live performance is a very wearing profession. The needed energy, prowess and bravura often come with a heavy physical price; also, non man dance careers are often truncated by Barbie-related issues. When a dancer continues to perform, it’s more akin to a coal miner staying down the pit than, say, a manager staying on despite re-organization and old-guy buyout. There are a lot of reasons, some more intriguing than others.

In spite of the challenges, Amy Swanson, who began performing in 1975, has chosen to keep dancing. Co-founder (with her late husband, Alain Salmon) of the contemporary dance performance venue Regard du Cygne in Belleville and a long-time all-round facilitator of dance culture, Swanson has variously been a choreographer, performer and teacher in Paris since 1980. She retired from running Regard du Cygne a little better than a year ago.

It turns out that Swanson had been casting even as she was bowing out of her old role – getting asked to cast, actually, as I’ve heard – for a certain number of performance projects. She went with TV director, choreographer and actor Mehdi Kerkouche’s Portrait. Kerkouche was born in 1986.

Portrait, a Netflix-style pop-psy “family portrait” blasts onto the stage with high-energy hip-hop choreography. It has become a live performance hit since its début this past January. Swanson, a life-long “Duncan dancer”, is the piece’s presiding genius, the mother, of Portrait’s contemporary dysfunctional (or functionally dysfunctional) family. Beyond her role in the Portrait narrative, Amy Swanson’s emotionally evocative, fluid, dance performance is in strong contrast with the vigorous break riffs of her challenging and challenged rejetons, kids, grandkids, great grandkids.

Coal miner, indeed! To get to where she is (now looking at performing all over France right into 2024), not only did Swanson have to follow a grueling schedule of getting acquainted with the succeeding generation’s habits and outlook, working on the contemporary dance creation process as well as rehearsals, Swanson’s now been uncomplainingly performing non-stop since Portrait hit the boards.

In some sense, Swanson’s role as presiding genius in Portrait denotes what seems to be her reason for accepting to be where she is.

The “Old Woman” from the Tiritaka site on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. Screenshot from Adélise Lapier’s Facebook discussion of its interpretation

“Duncan dancing” seems to mean a lot of things to a lot of people, so I can only speak for myself and say that a Duncan dancer – like Duncan herself – in some way links dance with a “human essential” – women, ecology, the sacred. Swanson is certainly committed to all three examples. Given the link, she’d agree that dance performance by definition is a vocation or a calling, not a job you can just do – neither miner nor manager. But I don’t think we should put too fine a point on this – the dance performance “warhorses” of Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Bétes de Scène that I discussed in an earlier essay, surely see dance as their calling, as do many miners and managers, for that matter, without going further than that.

I think Swanson – and along with her many, many dance performers besides – are keeping on keeping on because as herself and as a Duncan dancer, she sees something “true” in dance, sees dance as the primal art. Practicing dance, sticking to dance performance through her own passages of life is an existential imperative, not only for herself as an individual person but for the rest of us.

Indeed, when I sent  Swanson a note asking her why she kept dancing, she sent me Adelise Lapier’s commentary on the rare and well-known female stone image found at the Tiritaka site on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and called the “Old Woman”. Lapier tries to un-mystify portrayals of women in history by applying a tad of Motel of the Mysteriesconsciousness to her analysis. Lapier says that contrary to what one is often led to believe, the Old Woman doesn’t represent an otherworldly “goddess” but a quite ordinary wise woman or sorceress or shaman.

Gentlemen! Lapier says the Old Woman’s perfunctory breasts are just a visual cue, a convention, not a sign of heavenly purpose. The old woman’s broad shoulders and big strong hands, on the other hand, tell us about the role of Old Woman in a traditional society. “This old one no longer has the worries of a woman who is young”, Lapier writes, “She … guides, she holds up the world…”.

Anybody who’s had children knows just exactly the essential work grandmothers do, so there’s no need to perorate on Lapier’s analysis.

When I put it to Swanson that dance now belongs to her in the same way that the makers of the Old Woman believed wisdom or magic power belonged to women in their troisième vie, she wrote, “Especially maybe as a Duncan dancer. I feel it nails what my job is on stage in this piece and what the [feedback] from the audience [has] been.”…

Apart from compliments for her dancing as good as just good dancing, she continues, some talked about “true dance”, not just her theatrical choreographic representation as a motherly representation in Kerkouche’s piece, but saw in her dancing something more: a dancing between worlds. …

“That is exactly what I feel like I’m doing [when I dance),” Swanson says, “Like I’m on a parallel universe... on a bridge permitting me to mingle with the others on the stage or to be ‘out there’”…

2023-2024 tour program for Mehdi Kerkouche’s hip dance performance hit “Portrait”

Dancing old: social statement, cultural reflection, market opportunity, sacred art [By Tracy Danison]

School kids, their adult helpers, parents and neighborhood picnickers doing the first performance of choreographer Laurence Bertagnol’s “Connexion 6: Création Instantanée et participative” dance project for the suburban city of Bagnolet, July 2023. Photo © Guillaume Ison, courtesy Ville de Bagnolet 

I wrote last September about GRICP, an intergenerational dance program put together by choreographers Jean Christophe Bleton and Laurence Bertagnol. Full disclosure: after interviewing the pair, I joined the group. I’ll do it again this year, not because I want to bop till I drop, but because

Good sense, innocence, cripplin' mankind/Dead kings, many things … clutter the mind –Strawberry Alarm Clock, 1967

Bleton and Bertagnol’s GRICP is a democratic project with a straightforward argument: since dance is primary human art, everybody should have access to it. Bleton and Bertagnol agree that there’s nothing special about dance among us codgers when compared with infants and the ruck of non codgers; dance performance is by nature inclusive: it belongs to its performer, not their social situation (BAP September 2022: Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone).

Since talking with Bleton and Bertagnol, there seems to have been a spate of dance performance featuring performers entering what the French call le troisième âge – a dignified (and, by the way, non-chronological) way of referring to humans over 60.

What I’ve seen since the first of the year 2023 are two parts of a gender-blending triptych by Bleton (Ne Lachons Rien, the concluding piece, debuts in Paris in January 2024) along with Rachid Ouramdane’s Un jour nouveau, a short musical comedy nostalgia-style piece, accompanying Angelin Preljocaj’s and the remarkably talented Alterballetto troupe’s reflection on the social condition of the ageing and Portrait, Mehdi Kherkouche’s hip-hop-contemporary-dance performance as Netflix-style dysfunctional-family soap. These last were all at the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot last January and represent, along with Bleton’s triptych, pretty much the gamut of current approaches to aging in dance performance.

At least parts, if not the whole, of the interest in dancing codgers seems to me due to general post-Covid live dance performance effervescence. And also, there’s the sheer number of over-60s in good shape on both sides of the stage, so there are plenty of performers and, since we love nothing so much as studying our own selves, market opportunity.

But it may be that the real push towards featuring le troisième âge comes from the nature of Dance. Unlike narrative and sound and visual representation, Dance is, as Isadora Duncan knew when she revived it, the sacred art that joins our otherwise incoherent dust to universal flow, the marriage of Earth and Sky (BAP July 2023, Shards of Beauty: dust, stardust, sheep and wolves).

A Man of Many Words, and Every One Mattered: Robert A. Gottlieb (1931-2023) [by Mindy Aloff]

Note: This is part two of a two-part essay on the late Robert Gottlieb (pictured left with his auithor Robert Caro). Part one appeared last Saturday July 1.

Bob could read a booklength manuscript overnight and get back to the author with useful observations about it the next day. He felt that making writers wait for a response to a book just finished was cruel.  As a cosmopolitan thinker who did not, under any conditions, want to be considered an intellectual, he would often exclaim in my hearing that the first rule of writing is to “Get it done!!” As an example, he would offer not George Balanchine choreographing on union time (“Don’t think, just do!”) but rather the lyricists of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, who, under commercial pressures, would turn out yet another classic song—or two, or three in an afternoon between the matinee and the evening show.  

In his autobiography, Avid Reader, Bob writes that he arrived at popular lyrics via the movies and dance. With this particular enthusiasm came a remarkable co-editor, the musical theater historian Robert Kimball, who shares the editorial byline with Bob on their unique anthology Reading Lyrics, a compendium of 1,000 U.S. and English entries from across the Twentieth Century. To me, Bob rarely spoke of literary poetry, yet he seemed to have memorized countless song lyrics. In his review of Wilfred Sheed’s The House That Gershwin Built, Bob suggests that “for many aficionados, the best of them all” is Johnny Mercer, and he carried that suggestion to me when I was editing the Library of American anthology of dance writing, proposing I include Mercer’s comic lyric to the Betty Hutton song “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” (“I had a week to spare / He showed me the ground work, / The walkin’ around work / And told me to take it from there. . . .”) Bob’s generosity, including with his time, was remarkable when he believed in a project. (The poet David Lehman, who edits this web site with Stacey Harwood-Lehman, notes that Bob himself fact-checked his [David’s] volume about a segment of the American Songbook, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.)

In Avid Reader, Bob noted that one of the two best memoirs by dancers he knew of was by Paul Taylor, whose Private Domain Bob had edited (ballerina Allegra Kent, the other “best,” also enjoyed his beneficial scrutiny). Bob was, in his words, “an immense admirer” of Taylor’s choreography and of his dancing (which Bob first saw when Taylor was performing with Martha Graham, back in the 1950s), and that Taylor was the favorite choreographer of Bob’s wife Maria. “I loved Private Domain and I loved the man who wrote it,” Bob’s memoir reads. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Bob had helped Taylor build the scores for a couple of Taylor’s jukebox ballets—Funny Papers and Black Tuesday, whose recordings include unusual covers that, by the end of the last century, only a fan would know.  For Funny Papers, there is the anchoring number, a comic rendition, by classically trained Darlene Edwards, Jo Stafford’s alter ego in the 1970s Helen Reddy song “I Am Woman,” sung in an off-pitch imitation of Darlene Edwards; and, for Black Tuesday, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” the 1931 anthem of the Great Depression, with lyrics by Yip Harburg and music

 by Jay Gorney (a minor-key tune based on a Russian-Jewish lullaby), in the famous ‘30s performance by Bing Crosby, with its pristine diction and altar-boy purity. Bob’s participation in these scores for Taylor’s dances is only my guess, although it’s a guess educated by Bob.

Here are the best afternoons I enjoyed in the company of Bob Gottlieb:

---The first probably won’t sound like fun to most readers, but I was in heaven. Bob had some time on his hands and offered to help me proofread the entire galley of the Library of America anthology on dance that I edited, nearly 700 pages. We accomplished the mission in the silent, light-flooded, book-lined LOA offices. The managing editor, Trish Hoard, set up two copies of the galley side by side at a library table, with pencils and water and coffee: One copy had already been proofed and one was clean of proofreading marks.

At 10 a.m., we began to go over the pages together, checking the proofed ones against the clean ones, with the occasional discussion of spelling and semi-colons, of discrepancies between original and subsequent publications, and of the fantastical prose of George Washington Cable, the eloquence of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s phrasing, the exactitude of Robert Greskovic’s perceptions, the charm and glittering humor in Nancy Dalva. Around 12:30 p.m., sandwiches were sent up, and we continued working and exchanging views on dance writing and writing in general while munching. (In Avid Reader, Bob gives a cameo of proofreading in the Knopf offices with John Le Carré: The two lie down on the office rug and eat their sandwiches there.) Bob and I put down our pencils around 3 p.m.; the entire process took a couple of days. Trish said that not many of the LOA’s anthology editors ask to proofread their volumes in the LOA offices; yet (Bob hated the use of “but” as a conjunction), since we wanted to proofread together, side by side, this location made the most sense. Bob and I are both lovers of orthography and of the history of how English has been presented on the page. As such we were made for this exacting mission, and we had a wonderful, even ebullient time (as ebullient as one can be in sotto voce). Since, in contrast to Bob, I’m one of the slowest readers ever, I was happy to share at least some editorial skill with him. And what a pleasure to read and re-read those marvelous writings, to discuss them and to exclaim together over how much we admired them.

--The second experience occurred in the later 1990s. I was taking my daughter, Ariel, then eight years old, on the train to Stamford, Connecticut, to see the Balanchine ballerina Allegra Kent perform as the mother in a production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker.  By chance, we met Bob and Nicky, his and Maria’s son, then about fifteen, on the train to Stamford, Connecticut, to see the Balanchine ballerina Allegra Kent perform as the mother in a production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker.  We all sat together, saw the show together and took the train back to Manhattan together. At the station, we delighted in an elaborate exhibit of model trains,

In the spirit of that afternoon, I’ll draw this comment to a close with a bit of enthusiasm of my own for my favorite piece of writing by Bob: “A Lost Child,” about Minot Drouet, a French prodigy of a poet who, illegitimate and adopted, was nearly blind for the first three years of her life, heard a Bach organ composition on the radio and kind of woke up, and went on to put words together with taste, musicality, and passion. From then on, she composed fantastically haunting poems and letters, for which she was exploited by her adoptive mother and the complicit press. A forty-eight-page collection of poetry she composed at the age of seven or eight, in the mid-1950s, was heralded so vociferously that she was brought to meet (and be praised by) Jean Cocteau and Pope Pius XII. Life magazine tested her by putting her in a room with paper and pencil and giving her two topics to compose a poem on, with a deadline, as she was monitored to be sure that she received no secret help. She passed with flying colors.

Bob, who visited Paris annually for decades and spoke fluent French, was taken by Minot’s poems and by her story. He called her, now an adult, for an interview, but she turned him down; she had chosen to live in anonymity. And yet, he couldn’t abandon his effort to get to know her. He went to the small town where she lived and walked around it, asking denizens about her. He interviewed other writers about her. He couldn’t seem to accept that she was born with an almost freakish gift for writing, then chose to suppress that gift after being paraded in public by her mother and others, losing her marriage, and publishing a little memoir that read like an afterthought. What gets to me about this essay is that it is Bob’s possibly unique venture into terrain verging on fiction. It goes beyond reading about the poet to an attempt to find the subject himself, physically as well as psychically, refusing to take no for an answer, unable to free himself from obsession by writing. “That she survived at all is a testament to her strength,” he concludes. “That she lost Minou on her way to becoming Mme Le Canu is the price she was willing to pay.” 

Bob knew less about this mysterious genius than he did about the characters created by Dickens or Balzac or Tolstoy. Unlike their creations, the living poet would remain  analyzable though unfinished. It was her very elusiveness that prompted him to leave his reading chair and walk the streets in Jamesian pursuit of traces of her presence on her neighbors. In paying a great price for a calm existence, she became a pearl of great price in Bob’s personal cabinet of curiosities, a puzzle with just one more page to the solution—until Nature at last intervened to close and seal the book of life. 

--Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's most recent book, Why Dance Matters, was published in January by Yale University Press. She was hired by Robert Gottlieb to write the Dance column of Goings On About Town at The New Yorker, in late 1988, and, with two exceptions, contributed that weekly, without a byline, until mid 1993. In addition, she published 45 Talk Stories and Comments on a great variety of nondance subjects, also without a byline, as well as a long, bylined book lead on Sarah Bernhardt. Everything she published at the magazine was meticulously edited and fact-checked by up to eight individuals, including Robert Gottlieb. He treated all the copy, featured and departmental, with exquisite, personal care.

Shards of Beauty: dust, stardust, sheep and wolves [By Tracy Danison]

Château de Chambord, along the banks of the river Loire and one of the world's greatest shards of beauty, Photo: © Benh Lieu Song 

I’m a sucker for gravity waves, time gaps, colliding hadrons, unidentified anomalous vehicles, sheep peregrination and the Cloud Atlas Sextet – likely even to spot those clouds as I laze through a long warm evening along the river Loire, waving my wineglass and artistically complaining of my lumbago. No surprise, then, that I was attracted by a talk called Fragments de beauté : de la poussière du métro à la poussière d'étoile (“Shards of Beauty: from dust in the metro to stardust”). Shards is “Working Lecture #4” in the Université de Paris’ ongoing La Chaire Beauté lecture series. It was held the cozy, woody and damned hot Auditorium d’Honneur at the Beaux Arts.

One never knows in advance the knowledges to be plumbed or disgorged on an ordinary day.

At this Shards lecture, for instance, in addition to thoughtful discussion of perception, science and esthetics, I got a little insight into the obtuseness that was the 19^th century. Classy they may be, but wood mosaic panels have lousy acoustics: Clarwin you zay? Zex door? Buffalos? Charcuterie? Teutons? Where? – It’s all too easy to imagine the weight of all that misunderstanding hanging in the psychic air of August 1914.

But, as I always lend my ear hard, “as for detection of snakes”, as my father-in-law used to say, I grok Shards pretty well.

Flanked by a wonderful photo of one of visual artist Lionel Sabatté’s “dust wolf” sculptures, Yannick Mercoyrol, director of culture events at the chateau de Chambord – one of the world’s hoariest and grandest ancient dusty piles, a marvel of the marvelous river Loire –, mediated a discussion of the sense of “dust” by micro-meteorologist-chemist Cecile Engrandand Sabatté.

A wolf of dust, glue and iron wire by visual artist Lionel Sabatté guarding the central helical stairway at château de Chambord. Photo: Chambord 2023 © Leonard de Serres

Mercoyol reminded the audience of the traditional rhetorical use of “dust” as the dissociated husk of the soul – “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” – and pointed its contemporary iteration as primary material and/or point of departure for the world around. Engrand and Sabatté then went on to describe something like how “dust”, our way of saying “micro stuff”, shapes into “macro stuff” as worlds and as art.

Cécile Engrand studies the composition of the micrometeorites that daily rain on earth, notably, those found in Antarctica. She gave an overview, so to say, of how the Earth and the celestial corps general shape and have been shaped by the continuous accretions of particles that range from motes to comets. She highlighted the presence of carbon-hydrogen + compounds in this cosmic rain. Sabatté, meanwhile, recounted the debuts of a lifework highlighting the unshaped and un-shaping – dust and rust – as a lonely college-boy’s love affair with the dust-devils (moutons, they call ‘em here) in his tiny chambre de bonne.

The civilizational changeover from dust as metaphor for life’s end point to dust as life’s start point up above and here below, as cosmic rain and, especially, as perception of the material environment, has got me thinking about the frontier between the visible and invisible.

After all, the eye remains the fundamental measure of the world we see and the world we don’t. Not by accident, then, the measuring process involved in measure has become the great complexificator for plumbing and disgorging knowledges about the world we experience. Golly! Garçon! Another drink here along the banks of the Loire!

As to the idea of a rain of life from the cosmos, after listening a bit, my companion muttered, “Sploosh. Fish?” I am still not sure if she was kidding or succinctly commenting the Chain of Being.

Garçon! A drink for Madame!

Most of all, though, I am left thinking about the attraction of all towards all in the universe and the unsayable fire within, the movement that attracts us. “Attraction” is a pretty contrast to “struggle”, is it not?

Dreaming in the long evening here along the banks of a Loire studded with broken towers, chateaux now empty and restaurant cafés d’envergure, I cannot help wondering if Dance, capital D, is not the human shape of the attraction of all towards all…

A Man of Many Words, and Every One Mattered: Robert A. Gottlieb (1931-2023) [by Mindy Aloff]

Bob Gottlieb, a New Yorker who edited The New Yorker, died the other day, just a fortnight after he had turned 92. He made his name as a book editor, first at Simon & Schuster,  then at Knopf, where he was editor-in-chief. He was also an author, a dance and book critic, a father, a grandfather, and an all-around godfather to avid readers who were willing to present their work-to the world as a trade or a craft while tacitly demonstrating in the reasonableness of their ideas, the command of absurdity in their humor, and the music of their sentences that they know the arrangement and distribution of words is an art. Famous for his speed reading (though not for his even more astonishing gift of speed comprehension), he knew what made writing more than important: He knew what made it interesting.

 A man of principle and generosity, Bob could be an understated Barnum, drawing in readers with the promise of a little puzzle or dilemma to solve and guiding us over this river and through those trees until, suddenly, one finds that one has arrived at a resolution concerning an improbable subject about which one had never intended to acquire a point of view.

Bob was an only child whose prodigious reading was a huge part of his identity. He also commanded the social skill of making the person he was speaking with feel significant, even unique. In a conversation he would make an investment of himself rather than of his résumé. His glamour was that, by choice, he was beyond conventional glamour: he  could rarely be either forced or lured into wearing a tie, much less a suit. He owned several far-flung homes and he never packed so much as a toothbrush when traveling among them; he simply kept an identical wardrobe at each, the clothing heavy on tones of gray, and carried his copious reading on an e-reader.

I was one of a small group of lucky New Yorkers whom he’d ask to accompany him to the dance performances he reviewed for the Observer when his wife, the warm-hearted and esteemed actor Maria Tucci, wasn’t available. Occasionally in the evening Bob phoned me to discuss matters of cultural significance, such as what had happened to his preferred Chelsea neighborhood diner at 23^rd and Ninth. (Bob wasn’t what you’d call a foodie; however, he was a connoisseur of New York City diners.) Along the way, the topics we addressed would change momentarily from, say, the extinction of a diner to the extinction of the Oxford comma. In the way of conversations that go on for some time, we would excavate our mutual levels of anxiety down to bedrock. Bob liked walking in the city, although that was as far as he'd go into Nature. He knew the Earth’s climate was irreversibly changing. Rather than dwell on the predicament, he found it more rewarding to reread the novels of Theodore Dreiser and the reports of what people who almost died had experienced. Humanity engrossed him, including humanity in extremis.

In the half year or so before he died, Bob spoke rather a lot about an essay he intended to write that concerned the English translations of novels and essays by the Soviet-era Jewish author Vasily Grossman—“the Tolstoy of the USSR,” Martin Amis called him. Bob often said to me of Grossman, whose most famous novel is the sobering Life and Fate, that, as great a storyteller and stylist as the author was, he was an even greater human being. I became very curious about this paragon and rooted around the Internet for more information about him as I waited for delivery of my copy of The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman. That was how I managed, on the ‘Net, to discover the 2011 “Ukraine without Jews,” the first translation of the essay into English since its original 1943 version in Russian, whose publication was firmly squashed by the Soviet journal where Grossman submitted it. (Later, excerpts were published in Yiddish, a language comparatively so little read that publication in it, in mid-century world literature, was just a half step from not publishing.) In the words of Polly Zavadivker, the essay’s English translator, it is “one of the earliest public statements about the murder of the Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine.” She adds, “it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls ‘the greatest crime ever committed in history.’”

By the time he headed up Alfred A. Knopf, Bob had edited the memoirs of prominent Hollywood stars and figures. One of them, Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer and ex-wife of writer and producer David Selznick, he considered among his dearest friends. Still, Bob’s Garbo is not exactly a conventional celebrity book; rather, it provides a compendium—constructed with consummate taste—of how to look at a celebrity in a way that brings the reader pleasure, education, fantastical imagery, context, and fact.  It had been inspired by an extraordinary essay on Garbo’s films by an historian of cinema, James Harvey, that had knocked Bob’s socks off and that he wanted to answer and—by republishing Harvey’s essay in the back of Garbo—to offer as an object for admiration by others. When Bob Gottlieb was enthusiastic about something, he didn’t simply grab you by the lapels and gush. Like Lincoln Kirstein, one of his heroes, he moved mountains to showcase excellence in a way that would outlast him. Like Kirstein, Bob saw that writers and others in the arts who contributed work he admired were quietly helped in a variety of ways.

Enthusiasm was integral to Bob’s literary energy. A critic he certainly was. He could slice and dice what he disliked or found detrimental to the health of America as eagerly as anyone. Over the thirty-six years I knew him as a colleague at the theater, as someone he edited, and as a friend, every so often I landed on the business end of his vexation, and it wasn’t fun; it was, however, always instructive. And when he let himself plunge into what he treasured, it could be a positively Wordsworthian experience. Bob’s enthusiasm for Garbo’s screen performances produced a book that hangs a velvet rope between one’s passion for a star’s Beauty in the cinema and the beauty—or lack thereof--in the star’s life. (He cautioned me several times on the phone that Garbo’s luster on film turns to paste off camera—that life and art do not necessarily have causal connection.) By his last year, he was saying that he had no more professional obligations to perform anything other than what he wanted to do—and that what he wanted to do, really, was just to read as he waited for Robert Caro to deliver the manuscript of the last big Lyndon Johnson volume to be edited.

The editing of Caro’s final volume will be done by someone else, and Bob’s Grossman essay seems never to have made the leap from his thoughts into his computer. Having read a little Grossman and knowing a bit about how Bob thought, I believe he was attracted to Grossman’s ability to find pop-up moments of amusement during 24/7 horror-even when he had to report, with clarity and consummate pictorial economy, scenes of torment that make Dante’s Inferno seem like a trip in the fun house in Coney Island.

This is part one of a two-part essay. The next section will apppear on July 8.

Mindy Aloff's most recent book, Why Dance Matters, was published in January by Yale University Press. She was hired by Robert Gottlieb to write the Dance column of Goings On About Town at The New Yorker, in late 1988, and, with two exceptions, contributed that weekly, without a byline, until mid 1993. In addition, she published 45 Talk Stories and Comments on a great variety of nondance subjects, also without a byline, as well as a long, bylined book lead on Sarah Bernhardt. Everything she published at the magazine was meticulously edited and fact-checked by up to eight individuals, including Robert Gottlieb. He treated all the copy, featured and departmental, with exquisite, personal care.

Varieties of dance performance: trading a mess of pottage for sense and awareness [by Tracy Danison]

“The Game of Life”, sextet, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, cie Le principe de l’incertitude and Jean-Yves Macé, cie l’Instant Donné. Le Carreau du Temple, June Events, 14 June 2023. Photo © Le Principe de l’incertitude – Liz Santoro

Look! On stage! Is it ballet? Is it Krump? Contemporary dance? No! It’s performance! More incomprehensible than Jacques Lacan! More innovative than Merce Cunningham! More compelling than Lucinda Childs. It’s, well, it’s… Well. What is it, then?

 

“Haut-Fond”, solo, 1h. Creation 2023 by Céline Cartillier cie Météores. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 8 June 2023. Photo © cie Météores - Céline Cartillier 

In a previous article in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words (June Events 2023 dance performance festival features variety, environment and sense experience) on Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program, I wrote that the festival was pushing aside genre for focus on the arts of movement: dance performance. I’m all for it. I love Dance, capital D, think it is existentially important, think putting folderol such as genre in the way of appreciating it is unproductive.

I argue that talk of “genre” or “dance” vs. “performance” might be okay if you’re talking about a widely-recognized and limited series of repeated body movements, social dance, such as a Waltz, the Twist, or a square dance, or for traditional dance-entertainments such as ballet, non-shamanic sword-dancing, or a TV chorus line. But otherwise such distinctions are not very helpful.

Talking about “dance performance” (performance that takes dance movement and experience beyond words (un-narrative) for its primary resource) makes better sense.

So, for me, in making no distinctions between dance and performance and pushing no traditional genres, June Events 2023 made a public declaration of better sense – and made better sense work in practice.

 

“BOW’T TRAIL Rétrospek”, trio, 1h15. Creation 2020 by Rhodnie Désir, RD Créations with live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium, June Events, 6 June 2023. Photo © Kevin Calixte

A June Events spectator could blindly stab a finger on the program and come up with a variety of dance performance forms. Stab once and find yourself whirling and turning about almost modernly with Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard’s The Game of Life. Stab again and find yourself enmeshed in what seems to be a personal identity story hour with Habib Ben Tanfous’ Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas (“Here I leave to you what doesn’t belong to me”).

Though the old labels are pointless, I can’t help thinking it might be helpful to have a way of talking about several pieces as an ensemble, to identify a thread that joins Ben Tanfous and Santoro’s pieces as similar works of “dance performance”. Once identified, might this thread not suggest a different, more useful way of talking about dance performance generally?

The first night of the program, I ran into Atelier director-programmer Anne Sauvage. She was offering white wine in the garden that makes going to the Atelier so pleasant. Instantly donning my social autism hat, I took the opportunity to ask her in the most involved way possible what was the unifying part in the different pieces in June Events’ repertory?

 

“Playlist612”, trio, 1h. Création 2018 by Daniel Larrieu Astrakan, Collection Daniel Larrieu. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Benjamin Favrat

Sauvage is thoughtful as well as patient, so some days later, she stopped me to say: sensibilité, citing Julien Andujar’s “performance” Tatiana and Aïna Alègre’s “contemporary dance” THIS IS NOT (an act of love and resistance).

Sensibilité mostly translates into contemporary English as “sensitivity to” or “feelings about”; Sauvage meant that the thread that unites the program’s different performances is the experience of the “‘sense in and awareness of’ the different type of relationship” that each of the pieces features in different ways.* Just coming out from Tatiana, as we were, we could agree that Andujar had deliberately explored and made us aware of the sense in a very deep, very intimate personal relationship otherwise impossible to fully state without. Such exploration is explicit in the stated intention of Alègre’s THIS IS NOT.  

So, whether the one focuses on “material”: air, breath and the other, on the “psychological”: absence, presence, both share a process, exploration, and a drive toward sense in and awareness of a particular thematic or a problematic.

 

"Fila Fila Manani", duo, 30 minutes. Creation 2023 by Tidiani N’Diaye, cie copier coller. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 15 June 2023. Photo © Atelier de Paris

Later, when I tried, I could evaluate all the June Events pieces I was and would be able to see inside a schema of “(choreographic) exploration, (spectator) sense-awareness and thematic”. It works fine. Through the lens of “relationship”, “performances” such Nina Santés’ solo tanning box exploration of beauty services and products, or Haut Fond, Céline Cartillier’s exploration of movement, clay and sound, Rhodnie Désir’s Bow’t Trail exploration of the slave routes or MOS, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s pas de deux on and over a TV set , for instance, sit easily alongside “dance” such as Daniel Larrieu’s Playlist612 choregraphic (re-)enactments with heirs, Joanna Schweizer’s dancing revisit of man and bird in Des Oiseaux, Pierre Godard and Liz Santoro’s joyful almost traditional take on John Horton Conway’s concept of cell division, The Game of Life or Mélissa Guex’ wrenching Down, an attempt to merge dancer and drummer. After all, the thing that changes among them is how the choreographer tries to bring the spectator with them to “sense and awareness” of the type of relationship involved.

 

“MOS”, duo, 45 minutes. Creation 2022 by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Onassis Stegi. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou

However it might be, the schema sure beats trying to decide, first, if what I am watching adheres to some vague “dance or performance” conventions. Most important of all, I think, is that when I use it, I am thinking in terms of a choreographic process and its effect on me as a spectator, not asking to be entertained, not trying to figure out an embedded narrative or an authorial intention.

That, I think, is more likely to extend and refine my appreciation of Dance, capital D. That's important. So, as one of the 20th century's more serious philosophers to say, I'm going to "git on up!" and get down on it.

 

“Down”, duo, 25 minutes. Creation 2023 by Mélissa Guex, cie Sumo. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Zakary Braganca

*I have used “sensibility” previously to describe one of the steps/states involved in the process of creating dance experience and opening it on Imagination. 

Samuel Johnson defined “sensibility” thus (1755):

1. Quickness of sensation.

Modesty is a kind of quick and delicate feeling in the soul: it is such an exquisite sensibility, as warns a woman to shun the first appearance of every thing hurtful.

                                                                                        - Addison’s  Spectator

2. Quickness of perception.

Founder of Micadanses and festival Faits d’Hiver Christophe Martin honored for service to dance [By Tracy Danison]

“L’envahissement de l’être (danser avec Duras)” by Thomas Lebrun, Faits d’hiver 2023. Photo courtesy Festival Faits d’hiver © DR

Usually, when I say “They got what they deserve”, I mean, “They’re hoist on their own petard”. This time, however, perhaps in a sign that the Age of Aquarius really is just a glass of white-wine punch away, I mean no irony.

Christophe Martin, founder and director of  Micadanses dance creation and development center and the annual Faits d’Hiver dance performance event, more than merits the *Prix de la Personnalité Chorégraphique (2022-2023) awarded to him by the *Syndicat Professionnel de la Critique Théâtre, Musique et Danse. The critics cite Martin’s organization noos and his key role in dance performance creation, dance training and distribution, noting a “rare openness to esthetic diversity …”. 

Accepting the award, Martin declared: "I am honored that my career in service to dance has been recognized for its perseverance and originality.  I believe in a danse d’auteur: dance as personal art, as a way of thinking that is beyond words…"

“Portrait” by Rebecca Journo, Faits d’hiver 2023. Photo © Maxime Leblanc

Martin’s undertakings have been and continue very successful. Faits d’hiver celebrated its 25^th anniversary this year, honoring the choreographer and performer Thomas Lebrun and draing in more than 6000 spectators to venues all over the Paris region. Micadanses will celebrate 20 years of supporting dance through training, residencies and resources and public productions in 2024.  

Martin’s dedication to a danse d’auteur is indisputable. In my posts on The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words I have often found occasion to discuss original work encouraged, sponsored or put before the public by Christophe Martin.

Here’s what I’ll say in praise, in high praise, of Martin’s danse d’auteur: When Martin selects, encourages or puts on a piece, he shows a very cultivated knack for selecting a well-conceived, well-constructed, well-presented sensibility and (spectator) experience. Whether I’ve liked a piece selected by him or hated it or was indifferent to it, I’ve never once regretted being there with it. In Martin’s danse d’auteur, Dance, capital D, and seriousness, capital S, are always primary.

* “Prize for general choreographic work” … * “Union of Theater, Music and Dance Critics”

Faits d’hiver 2024, from 12 January to 9 February, will feature, among others, works by Mellina Boubetra and Nach, Harris Gkekas,  Tabea Martin, Leïla Ka, Shlomi Tuizer, Jean-Christophe Bleton, Silvia Gribaudi, Pedro Pauwels and Anne-Sophie Lancelin.

____________
The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words has featured Christophe Martin, Micadanses and/or Faits d’hiver in the following posts, among others:

Santé, Bonheur! Joy! Imagination! Discernment! Thoughts on some upcoming dance and performance [By Tracy Danison]

Something very much like love:  Sylvère Lamotte and Magali Saby dance “la faille” [By Tracy Danison]

More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects", Jean-Christophe Boclé [By Tracy Danison]

How is Rebecca Journo’s “Portrait” like the proverbial hedgehog? It does tricks that count [By Tracy Danison]

Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination [By Tracy Danison]

A Paris contemporary dance & performance primer: Festival d’automne & Festival Kalypso, Faits d’hiver & Rencontres internationales [by Tracy Danison]

Reverse engineering choreography to create dance [by Tracy Danison]

Scene from “Necesito” by Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble chorégraphique du Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris,  Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

I saw Dominique Bagouet’s Necesito, pièce pour Grenade twice this year, in the space of 30 days: in May at the Palais de Chaillot and, in April, at the fine Auditorium Jean-Pierre Miquel in Vincennes, a well-heeled eastern Paris suburb.  

Both times, formally, at least, it was performed by the l’Ensemble chorégraphique of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris (CNSMDP); the Ensemble chorégraphique is not just a run-of-the mill student dance group.

The artistic production (as well as the sound) for the two shows was also the same. Notably, with Rita Cioffi, who danced the piece as a member of Bagouet’s troupe, doing the Reconstruction chorégraphique and with Christine Bombal, who also danced with Bagouet, acting as Responsable du master (original interpretation) to the Ensemble’s Maitresse de ballet.

The participative presence of Rita Cioffi and Christine Bombal and, perhaps, the reconstruction of music and set, especially the floor, seem essential to producing a quality materialization of Necesito. Dominique Bagouet‘s pieces are passed down through the personal experience and memory of performers and other witness. Rather than draw up a choreography, Bagouet would transform an atmospheric/feeling/sensibility into people moving within its space.

For instance, for Necesito, Bagouet has imagined the atmospheric of the last bastion of Muslim Spain through the lenses of “a queen in ecstasy, a Catholic king in crisis of self-doubt, a wailing emir, a dreamy Infante, a poltroon of a torero, a barefoot dancer, a basic tourist, a solitary gypsy and an Al Andalus wizard” … as experienced and evoked in the movement of some contemporary tourists, all of whom look good enough to eat.

 

Scene from “Necesito” by Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble chorégraphique du Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris.  Photo © Laurent Philippe.

The Briqueterie’s notes describe the choreo-scenographic result for the Necesito atmospheric pretty well: “In shorts and summer dresses, a slightly off-beat group of tourists walks with slow intensity around the scene, sitting, laying down, stretching voluptuously. A floor in rose-colored marble incrusted with mosaic tiles evokes the Al Hambra.”

June Events 2023 dance performance festival features variety, environment and sense experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Peeling Back”, solo performance by Nina Santes. Photo © Roberto Martinez

DURING A BREAK BETWEEN COVID LOCKDOWNS, I went to a performance at one of the big theaters. About 30 minutes into it, people started walking out, saying they had come for “dance” and got “performance”. I became witness to an ongoing controversy. Something like What is dance? What is performance? Are they either-or, either-and or uniquely visual or narrative or choreographic? To be one or the other, must they include all the senses and all possible gestures or just some? Refreshing, given the circumstances. 

This is all fun to think about but I think that, after all this time, most dance performance spectators have got beyond the controversy and, following choreographer Yasmine Hugonnet,  accepted the notion of “movement art”. For the record, science is catching up to the notion that movement is complex whole body function. However it might be, most spectators today – if they aren’t vainly trying the guess what something “is about” – judge by results on themselves rather than some defined criteria: didja’ya enjoy it? To go further than that, most get a glass of something and, perhaps, a (light) snack, and puzzle out what it was they enjoyed or not.

 

“Play 612”, trio performance by Daniel Larrieu. Photo © Benjamin Favrat

Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program is giving spectators the widest variety of movement art forms – dance performance – I’ve so far seen in one program to enjoy, puzzle (and drink) over. I’ve been thinking a lot about movement forms and genres recently, so the news proves that synchronicity definitely exists. But it is no surprise. I mean a high-quality program that fully engages spectator interest is no surprise. Atelier de Paris ordinarily offers some of most creative and innovative dance performance anywhere. Just off the cuff, and only in the last six months, and just to mention two that might leave some darkly muttering “Balanchine” and two others that might have provoked squawks of  “performance”, I’ve been moved by accomplished movement pieces choreographed by Rebecca Journo, Aïna Alègre,  Dorothée Munyaneza/Radouan Mriziga and Ivana Müller.

June Events 2023 goes a lot deeper than forms of choreography. Atelier de Paris Artistic director Anne Sauvage, who, together with her team, put together the event, says that the program’s featured creators this year will be asking both “what can be and what must be dance performance” – filling in definitions and stretching possibilities.

 

"Tatiana", solo performance by Julien Andujar.  Photo © Vincent Curutchet

She writes that this 17th edition of the annual event will offer live “innovative, plural, open dance forms” that entangle body, poetry and dance to generate “magic, trance, energy”. Performances, she continues, will call on seeing, of course, but also on physical feeling, taste and smell, with particular attention to the experience of live music, especially of the voice. With a single exception, all the pieces on show are 2022 or 2023 creations. Many pieces include the immediate environment in the choreography: the neighboring Parc Floral de Paris or the Bois de Vincennes and urban space. Also featured are public and child-oriented performances, work integrating sign language (LSF), live music and pre-performance workshops and interviews.

I see the program as having psychological and an esthetic perimeters represented, roughly, by two movement choreographies. Habib Ben Tanfous’ Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas – around personal and social identity – and Aina Alègre’s THIS IS NOT (an act of love & resistance) – that knits dance fragments and phrases, scenes and symbols into a vocabulary of “movement energy”, referencing both Air and Breath – opens Atelier’s gift for participants – “participants” because we are talking live performance experience as well as dance performance, as much for THIS IS NOT as for June Events 2023 as a whole.

 

“MOS”, duo performance by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou. Photo © Onassis Stegi/Ωνάσσης Στέγη

In addition to good old enjoyment, Je lègue and THIS IS NOT, in one way or another, touch on all the questions the June Events program opens out for spectators: Surely, What am I? Where am I? What’s dance? What’s performance? What’s movement? What’s theater and how is it different from performance? Are the movement arts “body” arts or un-narrative arts or narrative unpicked or complemented? And what’s it all for?  

I don’t know.

But I do know that, in light of advanced search algorithms aggressively marketed as “intelligence” and simulated sight and sound aggressively marketed as “reality” and increasingly solid evidence that all this virtual stuff is not good for a human being, the most important question that a spectator might start asking during June Events 2023 is What is the importance of being here now with (each other, the world around us)?

________

June Events 2023 Performances 30 May – 17 June

Featured creators are asking both “what can be and what must be dance performance” – filling in definitions and stretching possibilities.

Prepare your June Events 2023 experience

13 May: Let’s dance! Open dance, music and singing workshops led by featured June Events creators. Free entry. No previous dance or performance experience necessary.

30 May, 19h30: Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas, Solo, 50 min. Création 2023 by Habib Ben Tanfous, cie FINEK . Atelier de Paris

30 May, 21h: THIS IS NOT (an act of love & resistance), 9 performers, 1h05. Creation 2022 by Aina Alegre, Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble & STUDIO FICTIF with

live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

1 June, 20h: Tatiana, Solo, 1h45. Creation 2022 by Julien Andujar, VLAM Productions. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

2 June, 18h: Carnavole improvised performance with Joana Schweizer and Miguel Filipe, with live music. Place de l’Église, Vincennes.

2 June, 20h: Ici et là, five professional performers accompanying prisoner participants 40 minutes. Création 2023 by Claire Jenny, cie Point Virgule. Atelier de Paris

3 June, 19h: Carnavole improvised performance with Joana Schweizer, Miguel Filipe, Lara Oyedepo and Justine Lebas, with live music. Mairie du 12ème, Paris

6 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

6 June, 19h30: Empire of a Faun Imaginary, four performers, 1h05. Creation 2022 by Simone Mousset. Atelier de Paris

6 June, 21h: BOW’T TRAIL Rétrospek, trio, 1h15. Creation 2020 by Rhodnie Désir, RD Créations with live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

8 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

8 June, 19h30: Haut-Fond, solo, 1h. Creation 2023 by Céline Cartillier cie Météores. Atelier de Paris

8 June, 21h: Peeling Back solo, 1h30. Creation 2023 Nina Santes, cie La Fronde. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

10 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

10 June, 19h30: Open/Closed duo, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Pierre Piton, cie La PP, with live music. Atelier de Paris

10 June, 21h: Les Noces & Pièce d’ensemble 11 performers, 1h30 with intermission. Creations by La Manufacture, Salva Sanchis & Alma Söderberg. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

13, 14 June, 19h30: The Game of Life for six performers, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, cie Le principe de l’incertitude and Jean-Yves Macé, cie l’Instant Donné with live music. Le Carreau du Temple

15 June, 18h: Fila Fila Manani duo, 30 minutes. Creation 2023 by Tidiani N’Diaye, cie copier coller. Atelier de Paris

15 June, 19h30: Des Oiseaux five performers, 1h15. Création 2023 by Joana Schweizer, Aniki Vóvó with live music.

15 June, 21h: Autour d’Hurlula, incantations dans la forêt, in situ performance for trio, 1h30 Creation Flora Détraz cie PLI with live music. DJ set by Miguel Filipe follows. Parc Floral (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

17 June 19h30: MOS duo, 45 minutes. Creation 2022 by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Onassis Stegi. A “dancing nursery” is available during the program. Atelier de Paris

17 June 21h: Play 612 trio, 1h. Création 2018 by Daniel Larrieu Astrakan, Collection Daniel Larrieu. Atelier de Paris

17 June 22h: Down duo, 25 minutes. Creation 2023 by Mélissa Guex, cie Sumo. DJ set by Klaire Alice follows. Atelier de Paris

Quote of the Day [by Harrison Ball]

NYCB Principal Dancer Harrison Ball. Photo © Ricky Cohete

Ed note: Soon after Harrison Ball was made a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet in 2022, he suffered several injuries that have ended his promising dance career. He is retiring from the company this spring, at 29. His final performance is on April 30. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview. Substitute just about any pursuit for "dancer" and the words of wisdom would still apply: 

Do you have any special words of wisdom or helpful hints to share with dancers who are either new to the art form or to the Company?

If I could give advice to dancers who are in training or beginning a performing career it would be a few things. I would say that as deeply as you work on your craft, you must work on yourself. The body is indeed the instrument you use but it is the mind that informs everything you do. Travel, travel, travel. See the world and expand your mind. You must attend performances in all theater mediums, go to museums and galleries and learn about the great artists, educate yourself on cinema and culture, keep up with the current affairs of humanity, watch other companies all around the world (social media can be a tool in this regard), learn new styles of dance, read the great literature of the world, take an acting class and learn how to be truthful in the moment, find a hobby that enhances your creativity as a performer. Most importantly, learn to be honest with yourself. It’s easy to get wrapped up in small things in the dance world. It is not life or death. Stick to the big picture. Once you get your first paycheck, you are an adult. Take responsibility in your life. There is no such thing as authority once you begin working. You will fear performance, colleagues, and faculty. Tell yourself to not be afraid anymore until you aren’t. Have no fear! And remember to not take yourself or everything too seriously. Fight to maintain your curiosity and joy. Have fun and enjoy your career no matter where you are. Work as hard as you can. It goes quickly. Most importantly, enjoy life.

You can read the full interview here. 

And it's not too late to catch Ball in his final performances. Find more information about programs and casting here. 

--sdl

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

“Acid Gems” by Adam Linder, inspired by George Balanchine's "Jewels". Photo © Laurent Philippe

I follow the work of the Ballet de Lorraine, so I took the fast train to Nancy, the troupe’s seat, to see its Spring 2023 premiers, Adam Linder’s Acid Gems and Michèle Murray’s Dancefloor. Stepping on to the platform, I walked down the short Neo-plastic and LED hallway, then crossed the entry-hall-commercial-court and out into a broad plaza.

Behind me, essentially unchanged since 1856, the station’s sober façade of yellowish brick with a big clock surmounted by the ducal arms partially hides the contemporary interior. Up a slope and straight ahead, the old town. To my left, the Tour Thiers, after Adolphe Thiers, founder of the fabled Third Republic: the fall of Napoleon III, the loss of Alsace & Lorraine, the Commune, Prussians on the Champs Elysées, the Belle Epoque and all that jazz. The thing might be La République’s pecker were a republic made of glass and metal. Just beyond, where the old town starts, the Art Nouveau restaurant Excelsior, serving decent meals off clean and quality linen since 1911. To the right, the 1920s-something Printemps department store. An Art Déco battle wagon. And then, straight ahead, between and slightly behind the restaurant and the battle wagon of consumption, an amazingly pleasing, almost-baroque façade.

The difference between Art Déco and Art Nouveau is mostly flowers.

“Dancefloor” by Michèle Murray, explores how people fit themselves together. Photo © Laurent Philippe

It all fits together, somehow. Teases time. Pleases the eyes. Intrigues the brain. It's a mirror of what the Ballet de Lorraine does for me.

That’s what the guest creators Murray and Linder do, too: fit people and genres and times together. Murray’s Danceflooruses interpersonal interaction (on a dance floor) to explore how people fit themselves together. Linder’s Acid Gems, using George Balanchine’s 1967 Jewels extravaganza as inspiration, “explores the possible links between dance genres, styles and their influences”.

Meanwhile, in New York, the Ballet’s choreographic duo Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are celebrating Merce Cunningham with their 2019 re-birthing of Cunningham and John Cage’s obscure 1944 dance-play For Four Walls. The Jacobsson-Caley couple aims to fit the Cunningham-Cage piece’s “history and our history with Merce” and identify some of the crackle in a creative and romantic entanglement. For Four Walls, is playing at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
on 21 & 22 April 2023.

Criticism and esthetics are largely matters of trying to figure out how things fit. I’ve been thinking a lot about how varied dance genres, gestures and postures are fit together. I’ve imagined choreographer Aina Alègre conjuring up an “energy fitting process”. I imagine her plucking fragments and phrases from a big box, fitting them by trial and error until she gets the buzz and crackle of her choreographic happening just right.

“Dancefloor” by Michèle Murray, dance is as encounter does. Photo © Laurent Philippe

I look at Murray’s and Linder’s work in the same light. Like Alègre, they’re practicing “energy fitting”; talking about dealing with forms, genres, vocabularies, fragments and phrases is certainly pertinent, but in the end, it’s all just a nod to the past by masters who are working out a new approach to movement.  

Coming away from Dancefloor, I’d say Murray feels dance performance is as human encounter does. Wobbling out on weakened knees from Acid Gems, I was convinced that Linder had demonstrated the real power of movement by making a parody of dance history.

At view, I thought of Murray’s dance floor as a lake. Around the banks of the lake, in shadow, clumps of people in street clothes chat and gaze and wait for an encounter. The scene as a whole – people-in-waiting-people-encountering –  is suspended in what is almost white noise: the beatless, rhythmless sound of an absorbing tension, like the skin of water or like ice. The clumps of people show and meet and glide, take form on the tension. As spectator, I see dance in the encounters. In the end, I can pick out very little identifiable dance gesture, posture or fragment or phrase (though if Murray’s premise hadn’t worked so well, I might have been able to).

“Acid Gems” by Adam Linder, movement that happens. Photo © Laurent Philippe

A (rather small) audience gives Adam Linder’s hard-driving 30-minute Acid Gems three very hard-driving curtain calls. That enthusiasm is because Acid Gems works as a spectacle and dance: because of the acid-head hues and flashes soaking the stage, because of its crowd of dance performers in au corps that run from blood-red to obscene-skin and because of a strong, attractive beat. Because each dance performer has an individual grasp of their own movement and how they and their movement fit in with their fellows. …

Distance, movement, color, sound, all carefully calculated to suck the spectator into the fray. But I feel that, as choreographer, Linder has ensured that every element of the scene has its own metric and this goes for bodies and their parts and their movement perimeters. Toes and feet, butts and hips, backs and bellies and bounds and leaps, leaping and bounding, brushing and touching and curling and crossing might seem to move from fragment to phrase, from mazurka to cluster fuck and back again but that's only what can be said – the vocabulary of dance … What happens is the happening of movement, beyond words but not beyond sensibility. Like Balanchine’s Jewels, Gems is spectacle, but like no Balanchine spectacle ever seen, because while Jewels is show-dance, Gems is movement that happens.

__________

Catch the Ballet de Lorraine in France this summer

4 May 2023 Valenciennes - Le Phénix Scène nationale: 
 Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”, Tatiana Julien’s “Decay”; Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”

22 May 2023 Paris - Musée de l’Orangerie - Trisha Brown’s “Twelve Ton Rose” - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Access to pleasure”

28 June 2023 Paris - Le Carreau du Temple, Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s 
”Discofoot”

1 July 2023 Nantes - Cours Franklin Roosevelt (Town Center Nantes) - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Discofoot”

10-11 July Paris - Musée du Louvre - Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”

La Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne 2023 #2: I got that hip hop feeling [By Tracy Danison]

“C Off the square. "C A R C A S S” by Marco Da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Jose Caldeira

For La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne 2023 the energy- in-creativity exemplified by Aina Alègre’s This is not an “Act of Love and Resistance” has a consistently “hip hop feel” even when it’s not hip-hop by any usual yardstick of entertainment culture.

I’m riffing more than a bit on John Ruskin to say what I’ll now say. Liberty Hall, as my mother used to say.

It’s a fact that over the past 50 years, hip hop – absorbing then concretizing Aquarian counterculture in the practical details of staying alive, joyful and in broad solidarity – has become a way of thinking, doing and living that has popular roots, ideology, legend and global reach.  And when it comes down to it, hip hop is about the whole body-brain and its articulation in the real world and the sacred space humans occupy in that world.

Let’s say that a “hip hop feel” comes down to an assumption that the goal of choreography is to make dance performance “happen”, to expand into “un-narrative space” and enable Imagination. For me, at least, there’s a firm line back from hip hop to Emerson to Isadora Duncan’s re-occupation of the Pantheon, and to the Age of Aquarius.

   … /

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity!

Everyman’s an angel!

/ …

                                                            - “Footnote to Howl” – Allen Ginsberg

Because of its unique ability to carry along energy-in-creativity – hip hop is now long beyond a genre influence. As ballet has been, it is the reference point around which a new dance performance culture is framing. Think: Wu Tang Clan, Ballets Russes.

While most of the choreographers on show at this year’s La Biennale come to the “hip hop feel” from outside the scene, I think that choreographer performer Anne Nguyen’s contribution, Matières premières (“Raw/Source materials”), along with her life experience,  best exemplify the hip hop feel that inhabits the persons and performances on show at La Biennale 2023. Nguyen has been in residence at La Briqueterie for the creation of Matières Premières and, as the new creation shows, she naturally and directly distills out the energy-in-creativity ethic that is increasingly taking over dance performance creation.

At 45 and long an artiste associé at the National Dance Theater (Chaillot), and, among other things, a poet and author of Manuel du Guerrier de la Ville (“Urban Warrior’s Manual”) Nguyen is not just a grown up b-girl, she’s a culture figure and culture bearer.

Although clearly tied into the global urban dance scene by training and attitude, Matières Premières’ builds on the African origins of its performers by their way of holding themselves as people, by country village-style mimetics and by billing the piece as “an initiation voyage” that joins the living present and the dead past. For a reason I don’t clearly understand, Matières brings to mind Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: you can say the story is a metaphor for a reality or you can say it is what happens.

 

Un ballet pour demain? “Matieres premières” by Anne Nguyen. Photo © Patrick Berger

The troupe takes a simple line form and frames what happens with the people in the line by repeating mimes of sowing seed and digging. Matières holds together flawlessly – the troupe synchronizes, desynchronizes, resynchronizes seamlessly. Performers smile and invite amusement, project harmonious awareness and personal rigor, execute a choreography that joins just about every hip-hop dance riff that you can think of into complementary phrases, along with, alongside and ahead of a varied music score. If there is a concept or archetype behind the choreography, it is “to give voice to”. However that may be, Matières works perfectly as movement art. Karine, my girlfriend, thought the troupe interpreted the music perfectly; I thought the music was perfectly fitted to the performance. So, the piece uses both music and movement to both build internal energy and enter spectator sensibilities. Then, to shape and direct the energy and sensibility, the choreography manages to frame its mimetic gestures on several levels: evoking origins, playing as in an unseen play, invoking sympathetic magic (the reflex to think of our bodies as analogs to the world and vice versa). The “initiation voyage” turns out to be “happening” – creation of a space for Imagination.

In the context of straight performance, it is possible to find the hip hop feel in the themes or subthemes.  For instance, the first La Biennale 2023 performance I went to was Yasmine Hugonnet’s Les Porte-Voix  Cabaret ventriloque - récit vocal et chorégraphique (“Carrying voices - Ventriloquist cabaret: vocal choreographic recital”) – a performance piece par excellence. Done by Hugonnet and three other equally top-notch artists, the performance unpacks the many possible experiences/senses of “oracle”, Les Porte-Voix choreographs sound/fragment-words/senses and ventriloquism to point the very complex notion of “giving voice to” – one of the basic ideas of hip hop (lately, especially in its incarnation as Krump). If “poets, priests and politicians” or other Others have ever interfered with your transmissions, you know why “to give voice to” is an archetype, as well as why Hugonnet goes “un-narrative” or experiential to get at it.

 

Working with archetypes? “Les Porte-“Voix  Cabaret ventriloque - récit vocal et chorégraphique” by Yasmine Hugonnet © Anne-Laure Lechat

A focus on energy generated in creativity is what joins Hugonnet’s performance piece to Marco da Silva Ferreira’s pretty obviously hip hop inspired C A R C A S S. The piece uses music by a deejay and drummer on the edge of the stage and pretty much puts spectators in the same frame of experience as the hypnotic repetitions of Lucinda Childs’ Dance, with which it was in a double header at Maison des Arts de Créteil, formerly popular hip-hop and contemporary choreographer Mourad Merzouki’s development center.

I don’t think I was alone to see The Ballet de Lyon’s Dance and da Silva Ferreira’s C A R C A S S one after the other or to find points of communion in them.

For all that da Silva Ferreira clearly buys into hip hop as a genre as much as say Anne Nguyen, both pieces focus on building an energy that enables “happening”, both come off as coherent energy lifting and pulling spectators with them. The Ballet de Lyon lays a holographic video of the original piece over the live performance so that it is, quite literally, accompanied by its past and simultaneously dramatized and commented. Building away from the formal “ballet” tradition, Childs and Glass looked to repetition and fascination to make Dance happen as dance. Building out of hip hop where form has always been about conjuring energy and where experiment is the name of the game, Da Silva Ferreira just assumes happening is dance; performer movement builds energy, leads and shapes happening.

When I think about other performances on the bill, I see hip hop energy taking many shapes, remaking old genres. Krump, now a very, very popular break-dance style, is a good example of how hip hop has become the broad church of dance performance. Aside from allowing frenzy, I can’t really see what makes Krump different in form to other break dance. A couple of years back I asked the brilliant Krump choreographer performer Nach if Krump was hip hop psychotherapy. She said I could put it like that. So I do.

 

Un ballet pour demain? “Silent Legacy” by Maud LePladec. Photo © C. Vayssie

Nach’s recent Elles disent, a Krump-based piece so full of take-it-for-granted innovation and intelligence, it’s hard to know where to start praising it, especially puts a finger on a conjunction of catharsis/ expression in hip hop and contemporary dance.  I think “Krump” designates more choreographic intention than performance form; the frenzy in it has more of catharsis in it than the free expression in contemporary dance has.

All this being said, I came out of Maud Le Pladec’s Krump-inspired Silent Legacy, feeling that I had witnessed a “battle ballet”: two “life passages” framed in Krump body energy. Le Pladec puts together Adeline Kerry Cruz, an 8- year-old b-girl prodigy, a grand bear of a b-boy, choreographer, teacher and DJ called Jr Madripp, who plays the psychoanalyst/facilitator, and Audrey Merilus, a 20-something b-girl. The battle format and Madripp’s central role makes for a diptych presentation, (contrast rather than comparison), which, in turn, makes of Krump catharsis a form of ballet.

Adeline Cruz - in a baseball cap, sneakers, bowl-cut thick blonde-brown hair – takes up a pose of a wound-up urban warrior gathering herself “to give voice to-be” herself. She explodes into the extremely athletic version of strict body control, throwing her chest out as if to show her bursting heart, ready to accept her vulnerability through a relation of confidence with Maddrip (she actually perches on his broad shoulders). The girl’s age and break dance expertise highlight the animating intention behind Krump. For instance, her 8-year-old body has more force than heft, so vigorous moves such as stamping make her rebound, fly.  

As Madripp and Cruz are leaving the stage, Madripp makes a heart with joined hands. From this gesture, I suddenly see in Cruz’ performance a “dying swan”, feeling, the value of life: an animating archetype of “to give voice to-be me” embedded in highly formalized dance.  When Audrey Merilus follows Cruz on stage in my eyes her performance contrasts as the fragment “Giselle risks dance” or  “be- grow to risk to be”. Merilus female’s body is very much part of the performance – not exotic, not esthetic, not erotic, it says, ‘this is how my voice is’. Her first posture is ready-set-go = “grow-go”. With the same expert control as her young collaborator, Merilus explodes on stage but also off stage: “be-risk-grow”.

Call it energy-in-creativity, “hip hop” or dance with popular roots, ideology, legend and global reach, La Briqueterie’s offer is about the whole body & brain.

Be-risk-grow. Put La Briqueterie on your bucket list. 

__________

As part of La Briqueterie’s La Biennale 2023 program, I saw Yasmine Hugonnet’s “Les Porte-“Voix  Cabaret ventriloque - récit vocal et chorégraphique” performed by Matthieu Barbin, Ruth Childs, Madeleine Fournier, Yasmine Hugonnet at Atelier de Paris on 15 March 2023. Hugonnet’s “Peau de l’espace” was also featured on the festival bill ;  Maud Le Pladec’s “Silent Legacy”, performed by Adeline Kerry Cruz, Jr Madripp, Audrey Merilus on 25 March 2023 at the Salle Jacques Brel, Fontenay-sous-Bois ; Marco da Silva Ferreira’s “C A R C A S S” performed by André Garcia, Fábio Krayze, Leo Ramos, Marc Oliveras Casas, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Maria Antunes, Max Makowski, Mélanie Ferreira, Nelson Teunis, Nala Revlon on 16 March 2023 at Maison des arts de Créteil (MAC) ; Anne Nguyen’s Matières premières as performed by Ted Barro Boumba alias “Barro Dancer”; Dominique Elenga alias “Mademoiselle Do”; Mark-Wilfried Kouadio alias “Willy Kazzama”; Jeanne D’Arc Niando alias “Esther”; Grâce Tala; Seïbany Salif Traore alias “Salifus”; Joseph Nama alias “Jo Kiero”  on 5 April 2023 at Théâtre des 2 Rives , Charenton-le-Pont. I saw Nach’s “Elles disent” performed by Adelaïde Desseauve, Manon Falgoux, Sati Veyrunes, Nach, Sophie Palmer at Atelier de Paris on 2 February 2023 as part of the Faits d’Hiver 2023 program.

Other creators and performance dance creations featuring in La Biennale 2023 included Jonas & Lander,  “Bate Fado”; Nadia Beugre, “Legacy” along with Robyn Orlin’s “In a corner the sky surrender - unplugging archival journeys... #1 (for Nadia♥)”; Volmir Cordeiro & Calixto Neto performing Lia Rodrigues’ “Outrar”; Roser Montilo Guberna & Brigitte Seth, “Salti”;  Monika Gintersdorfer, Timor Litzenberger, Carlos Martinez, Mugler and a computer performing “Trio (for the beauty of it)”; Volmir Cordeiro with Cie Donna Volcan, “Abri” and; Tânia Carvalho, “Versa Vice”.

Fitting the right energies instead of matching genres may not be an act of love and resistance but it works well [By Tracy Danison]

Fitting dance energies instead of styles and genres, “This is not ‘An act of love & resistance’”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Alice Brazzit

Aina Alègre’s web bio says her choreography looks to re-imagine the body.

But for me, a spectator of her choreography, she’s re-imagining dance. Her blazon reads “Every move that fits”.

“Fits” is the operative word.

I first noticed Alègre's particular ability to fit together fragments, phrases and sequences of different movement genres in R-A-U-X-A, a solo piece, where I was tickled to feel what I thought of as Qi gong “standing meditation” fit into a common strand of sound and movement energy she calls “hammering”.  

In her 2022 creation This is not “An act of love & resistance, a dance performance for nine around the concept of air/breathing, Alègre seems to double down on the fitting. With fragments, phrases and sequences of movement genre, she fits together people by winding them into processions, parades, marches, solos, groups doing break, ballet, modern and contemporary, expressionism and formalism, canned and live music and three slide trombones one French horn. There’s no homogeneity, no heterogeneity, nor does the piece gel. This is not “An act of love & resistance fits. Because it fits, it “happens”.  

For me, the piece happens because in the fitting process each performer and each movement fragment, phrase and sequence is chosen for energy generated and/or exposed rather than for its genre or style (movement form). It’s this selection criterion, a granular focus on energy created and released rather than visual or narrative or symbolic logic that’s unique in Alègre’s success.

A bit like making a magic spell, “This is not ‘An act of love & resistance’”. Photo ©  PhileDeprez

In R-A-U-X-A, the energy criterion is around “hammering”. In This is not “An act of love & resistance” I think the criterion for animating Alègre’s concept of circulating air might be called “leaf in the open air’, the oscillating energy of iterative shiver and stutter of things moving in the environment.

Imagine the selection process as your fixing a criterion/concept firmly in your inner eye. You then sit down in front of a huge box garishly branded “Dance Performance”. Inside the box are thousands and thousands of pieces of movement: fragments, phrases, sequences. The pieces are all identifiable by somebody somewhere; some are embedded in narrative logics, some seem even to “naturally” go together, like in a picture puzzle: blue must be water, might go with curl of a wave; pale blue, sky, fluff of cloud; hands, fingertips touching, above the head, in front of the chest, ballet, tradition; hip twist, Indian dance, break, urban pace; top body sweep, qi gong; inside body whirl, ball room... You take a deep breath, pour yourself a nice cup of, say, organic mescal-flower tea. You push aside logic and pick and choose according as to how a piece reflects the energy you want to reveal or radiate. Then, very patiently, guided by the senses of your inner eye, by trial and error, you select each piece according to how the energy bits fit with each other in the frame of your concept.

If the fitting process seems a bit like making a magic spell, and if Aina Alègre’s This is not “An act of love & resistance is any indicator, making the dance happening happen is also a matter of competent but ordinary stagecraft and tools.

Performers with sound enter from the back of the auditorium; a pellucid screen divides the stage into common and private space. Musicians and dancers turn and glide among each other while slide trombones pump and a French horn breathes from the brass loops of intestine over a base of shifting light qualities and intensities, melodies and harmonies. Stage and tools aid in keeping the concept energy coherent, guide spectators towards the experience of what is happening.

The freshness and originality of both This is not “An act of love & resistance” and R-A-U-X-A, along with their resemblance to other quality dance performance suggest that “fitting energies” has a future in dance performance creation.

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On 30 May 2023, Aina Alègre’s "This is not 'An act of love & resistance'” will open the Atelier de Paris’ annual June Events program. On 17 June, Alègre will open the Festival de Marseille at Citadelle de Marseille (Fort d'Entrecasteaux) with "Parades & désobéissances", a creation for 100 amateur dancers. The Citadelle will be open to the public for the occasion.

Alègre directs the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble (CCN2)  in tandem with Yannick Hugron.

I saw Alègre’s "This is not 'An act of love & resistance'” (2022) on 22 March 2023 at Théâtre-Cinéma Paul Eluard, Choisy le Roi, as part of the Biennale de danse du Val de Marne 2023. It was directed by Aina Alègre and performed by Maria Astallé, Maria Cofan, Cosima Grand, Hanna Hedman, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Maria Puertas, Gwendal Raymond, Julia Soler and Asha Thomas.

I saw R-A-U-X-A (2020) on 8 May 2021 at the Atelier de Paris. R-A-U-X-A is a must see.

La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne: “Célébration, transmission, imagination” + energy in creativity and happening [By Tracy Danison]

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Bordering Paris to the east and south, Vitry-sur-Seine in the Val de Marne department is a foot-of-the-wall town that was once the City of Light’s source for bricks. Like Bagnolet, where I now live, Vitry has a founding role in the development of contemporary dance in France.

Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos, at the time director of Vitry’s Théâtre Jean-Vilar, and choreographer Michel Caserta set up La Biennale nationale de la danse in 1979, ten years after the late Jaque Charaund had set up Concours de Bagnolet, essentially launching the careers of many of today’s choreographic luminaries. Barrientos and Caserta aimed to bring together dance performance actors of all stripes and trends – much of which was getting its start in Bagnolet –  in one showroom.

The department of Val de Marne picked up sponsorship of Barrientos’ and Caserta’s La Biennale in 1981 and renamed it La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne. The department continues to assure the event’s long-term funding and survival through what would become today La Briqueterie - Centre de développement chorégraphique national du Val-de-Marne (CDCN). Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos went on to found Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine Saint-Denis, in effect, internationalizing Charaund’s effort to open dance to new influences and wider audiences.

In the 2000s, in order to house La Biennale and its different dance development and dance-performance activities, Val de Marne transformed Vitry’s industrially historic but long-abandoned briquetrie (“brick works”) into today’s La Briqueterie.

La Briqueterie the building is a tour-de-force of restoration and historic conversion architecture. It highlights all the architecturally interesting and historic bits within a crowded urban space that was, in great measure, built to service the factory and its people, then mostly immigrants from Italy. Social history and architecture aside, it would be tough to find a better space to do dance performance of every stripe and trend than La Briqueterie.

This year’s La Biennale’s communication touts its themes of “la célébration, la transmission et l’imagination” as signaling continuing commitment to its historic mission of openness to the widest possible range of dance performance and creation. A glance at the venues, choreographers and performers featured, hints that that is justified bragging.

A deeper dive into the program and experiences of my chosen performances show that organizers, under a new director, Sandra Neveut, do what they say (and do what they say they have always done): focus on what distinguishes dance from other arts, recognize dance heritage and encourage dance creation.

“Dance”, Lucinda Childs, Sadler's Wells. Photo © Tristam Ranton

The heritage claimed is a pretty wide one, not so much in time as in the idea of it: between Lucinda Childs’ 1979 geometric Dance and a reconstruction of Dominique Bagouet’s 1991 Necesito, pièce pour Grenade, a dance meditation around the fall of Granada, last bastion of Al Andalus.

For Childs’ Dance, the ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon reprises a piece it adopted into its repertory in 2016 as an epitome of “pure” modern dance. The creative innovation is that a holographic projection lets us see the live performance quite literally side by side with, and through the lens of, the original. The effect is not just visually lovely, it’s intellectually intriguing, one of the only times I’ve seen video-technology work well with live performance.  

Lucinda Childs, a true American original, started bringing her purifying geometric twists to US ballet dance “tradition” to France in the late 70s – starting at the Avignon festival and then setting up in Paris. Dominique Bagouet, familiar with every dance trend and style of the 60s and 70s, brought Jaque Charaund’s Bagnolet to Paris. When Bagouet won first prize at the 1974Concours he’d already danced Balanchine repertory in Geneva, and studied or danced with Maurice Béjart in Brussels, Carolyn Carlson in Paris and Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown in New York. Dominique Bagouet died of AIDS in 1992.

In contrast to Childs, who is always very careful about getting her choreography (and music) into neat and entrancing parcels, Bagouet didn’t even write up his choreographies. He saw dance as a time-, people- and space-specific type of thing, was making a sort of “danse auteur”.

The contrast between the two masters is particular as well as general. Childs’ Dance is so thoroughly documented you can project an “original” on to it, while Necesito and his other works have to be “reconstructed” from observations and intentions in his notes and the experience of those who had danced them originally.

Necesito’s latest incarnation takes the form of Rita Cioffi, who danced the first Necesito, as well as many other pieces, with Bagouet and a band of young performers from the Conservatoire de Paris.

Between Lucinda Childs and Dominique Bagouet, there’s quite a lot of room for a range of approaches to dance performance. Then, again… Thinking over the La Biennale program – and going beyond the particular choices made by La Briqueterie’s new management,  I think all the performances on offer can fit, one way or another, into an approach that situates joyfully in middle and at both ends of La Biennale ’s heritage and mission.

I’d call that approach “energy in creativity”.  And I’d say that when all is sorted, energy-in-creativity is what Dominique Bagouet and Lucinda Childs have in common.

What I mean is that, whatever the approach, genre, trend or tradition a featured artist has chosen for their La Biennalecontribution, whatever the stated intention, they will focus their creativity on the “energy” (cf. “la célébration” and “l’imagination”) generated by their production. Let’s put it this way. In the end, La Biennale’s featured performances – all the creators have solid track records – are not about telling truths or showing beauty, but about what in the 60s they called “happening”.

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The choreographer that best exemplifies the energy-in-creativity-happening approach at La Biennale - La Briqueterie – and at other contemporary dance performance venues, too – is Aina Alègre. With its procession and parade, This is not “An act of love & resistance”, a 2022 creation and Alègre’s contribution, best brings into focus this approach that situates itself between unique expression à la Bagouet and pure form à la Childs.

Alègre’s piece finally “happens”, it seems to me, because of a “fitting process” that, in contrast to the practice of linking visual or narrative or symbolic logic or content, links each performer and each movement fragment, phrase and sequence according to the energy it generates.

The strength of Alègre’s “energy fitting process” and the effect the energy produces for the audience (“happening”) have a part, I think, in Alègre’s current success as a creator at La Biennale, surely, and more generally.

In view of the success of Alègre as both a thinking professional/activist – she, in tandem with Yannick Hugron, has been recently appointed director for the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble (CCN2) , and charged with expanding dance presence in the communities of the region – and her choreographic creation, it is no accident that the original This is not “An act of love & resistance” will open the Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program. She will also open the Festival de Marseille at la Citadelle de Marseille (Fort d'Entrecasteaux) with her Parades & désobéissances, a creation for 100 amateur dancers.

La Biennale comes only every second year, but La Briqueterie is a performance that happens all the time. Fans of the Movement Arts should keep a weather on it until La Biennale comes round again in 2024. 

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I saw Lucinda Childs’s “Dance”, music by Philip Glass in combination with a video of the original performance reconstructed by Marie-Hélène Rebois at Maison des Arts de Créteil (MAC) on 16 March 2023. The performers or substutes included Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon dance performers Marie Albert, Jacqueline Bâby, Edi Blloshmi, Eleonora Campello, Noëllie Conjeaud, Katrien de Bakker, Yan Leiva, Brendan Evans, Jackson Haywood, Marco Merenda, Chiara Paperini, Lore Pryszo, Leoannis Pupo-Guillen, Anna Romanova, Albert Nikolli, Erík Sosa Sánchez, Giacomo Todeschi, Merel Van Heeswijk, with Jocelyne Mocogni as maîtresse de ballet. A. Christina Giannini made the costumes and Beverly Emmons did lighting; staging and scenario were put together by Hélène Louvart, Anne Abeille, Jocelyne Ruiz, with special effects by Philippe Perrot. I saw "This is not 'An act of love & resistance'", on 22 March 2023 at Théâtre-Cinéma Paul Eluard, Choisy le Roi.