The Best American Poetry

About dance performance and “faraway countries”: Lithuania [by Tracy Danison]

Edgy, personal: “When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone” by Vilma Pitrinaite. Photo © Patrick Berger

Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts –  is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue. 

Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene. 

Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups. 

As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.

For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying. 

Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods. 

Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.

 

Hands-in-pocket performance: “She dreamt of being washed away to the coast” by Lukas-Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work,  Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus. 

Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest? 

Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?

The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment. 

As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.

Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces  “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______

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

Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that touching, all that tenderness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why do I cling to the fears of Oedipus?

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

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

Mohamed Toukabri makes wonderful dance performance.

_________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born January 22, 1904.

Choreographer George Balanchine with Mourka. Photo © Martha Swope. 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

Performance revealed: movement, un-narrative and the silent beginnings of Imagination [by Tracy Danison]

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

“The important thing is to move.”

- Resident of Kiev explaining why he took his girls skating despite ongoing missile strikes, National Public Radio (USA), 1 January 2024

I saw The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by the Australia troupe Back to Back at Théâtre de la Bastille a few weeks back.

Seeing Shadow at Bastille is part of a larger project of mine.

Bastille came into new management after 25 years in 2023 (Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results). New broom sweeps clean, as they say, so I think this is a good time to follow Bastille’s theatrical program and through it, try to clarify what I mean by “performance” as opposed to “dance” or “play”.

I already think, along with many others, that there’s a “movement art”. From my experience, “performance” is a variation around movement art. When I say “movement art” or “performance”, I mean a live, in-person, essentially creative, public activity. Creative movement activity is tightly associated with visual and, to a lesser extent, sound and other outside and interpersonal stimulation.

I use “Dance (capital D)” to reference movement art; the “capital D” because I am inclined to think Dance is the first art, the Art from which the others stem.

Stemmed from Dance, I use “performance” as shorthand for at least three activities: “performance art”, performance around visual(ized) material; “performance theater”, performance stemming out from theatrical tradition; “dance performance”, stemming out from dance tradition… that is, from every form and genre called “dance”, from Louis XIV ballets de cours to Fabrice Ramalingom’s Frérocité (“Brotherly Ferocity”), set to premier at the end of January 2024.

 

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

I believe that for most creators, (contemporary) performance has its origins in the “open interpretations” of modern and contemporary visual art. I don’t think, for instance, that the currently active and excellent theater performance creator Nathalie Béasse is alone to have begun as a sculptor (Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal). Also, for instance, the visual artist Yves Klein and those around him early wind up associating their material (visual) art production with the performance around it.

An affirmation of the notion of movement as the first art and a clear idea of “performance” and its utility to and effects on me and on others gets me nearer to succeeding, at least in my own mind, a confluence of art and science, a better knowledge for achieving better quality art, better health - especially psychic health – and a better understanding of my existential situation.

What is the nature of live, in-person movement? Why is so craved and so feared?

Then there are contemporary questions: Is on-line interaction really “interaction”? For instance, much “psychotherapy” is now being offered by video link – how is therapy changed when in-person “interaction” is reprocessed and re-made by a technology based on a phenomenon known to independently affect consciousness? How much of psychotherapy is actually physical presence and interaction. How much is talk? Is on-line psychotherapy still psychotherapy?

Most of all, however, I believe from my life experience that the experience of live, In-person Dance in any form is a key to empowering transformation, “changing the narrative”.

 

“Où allons-nous? #15”, 80x280cm. Gérald Foltête. India ink, acrylic, oil and collage on canvas. Photo © Gérald Foltête

 

Most research money in science is spent cracking open stuff to see what’s inside, but what matters for the stuff itself (and, being essentially stuff caught up in stuff myself, for myself) is the choreography of it all, that is, the movements and arrangements of said stuff in space. Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy rightly observes that any savage can dance. He does not note that the bright ones among them become the world’s choreographers, arranging stuff to do everything from dance performance to fly death-ray equipment up to the moon. I expect he was too hot and bothered by the subtle perfume of Lizzie Bennet and her light-steppin’ wriggle.

Santé, Bonheur! Some performance, people and places suggestions for your Paris project [By Tracy Danison]

Natali Broods, Peter Van den Eede, “Le Nouvel Homme”, cie De Hoe, Théâtre de la Bastille, October 2023. Photo © Koen Broos

The other day I saw a performance called Mémé (“Gramma”) by Sarah Vanhee at Théâtre de la Bastille. One thing that came across to me during it was how much fearing pleasure and justifying unhappiness has made sense of the ordinary misery of a northern European’s life: everyman a drunk corporal, everywoman a souring womb. My grandparents were all born in the 19^th century and hers in the 20^th, but spot on, Sarah Vanhee.

For Chrissakes, us, from now on: Enjoy pleasure.

Just a few days after Mémé, I, or, rather, my woman-friend, was invited to have a glass of wine with some people I will now make sure become friends – good wine and free wine, too, with nibbling stuffs so tasty that, to keep myself from untoward gobbling, I squeeze-held Karine’s hand. Still not tied to a bed at the aged-pauper care unit, she says I should be careful not to publicly bare untoward appetite, just in case. She also says that accidentally putting on your underpants backwards means you will get a present – says it’s a French folk belief (and won’t work if I do it on purpose).

Friendly in her manner, easy in her regard, our host raised her glass.

Santé, Bonheur! she cried, clinking her glass against her partner’s.

She managed (to at least seem) to look each of us, sincerely, in the eye. 

Health, Happiness. Eliza Doolittle. A room somewhere. Warm feet. Warm hands. Tracy Danison. Nadine’s Persian-style rice. Ahmed’s Accras – des bons! Ma’s Blackberry pie. Something to occupy the eye and the mind.

To all and everyone, then: Santé, Bonheur!  Health, Happiness!

Wait for it. Imitatio hostessa geniala: what follows is my way of sincerely looking each one of you in the eye, or seeming to, and of making suggestions for fleshing up and strengthening your Paris project (NB: everyone who reads this has one) even if you’re still waiting on the Kairos of it.

I’ll stick to things I’ve already experienced, things that I know that, whether you will or will not like them or not at the tasting, you will be able to appreciate: see to the heart of the thing.

And, since it’s only December, in the spirit of my genial host, and in order to have the pleasure of offering more presents later on, I offer only things that endure or repeat in Winter and early Spring. Roughly, from Christophe Martin’s penultimate Faits d’Hiver dance performance program to Petter Jacobsson’s and Thomas Caley’s premier of their creation Instantly Forever at the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy.

That’d be middle January to middle March, 2024.

I made first acquaintance with the genial host through her open table and good wine. I commence my suggestions with a suggestion for giving.

 

Sarah Vanhee, “Mémé”, Théâtre de la Bastille, November 2023. Photo © Bea Borges

Regard du Cygne is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024. Founded by Duncan dancer, American expat, choreographer, theater manager and mother Amy Swanson and her late husband Alain Salmon, the Belleville landmark is publishing a book to mark the occasion. Regards Partagés will feature the voices of the many past and present dancers and choreographers who have benefited from the studio’s material and spiritual support. Make an ongoing donation to Association Musique Danse XXème, Regard du Cygne’s dedicated support organization. Help them publish and prosper and pursue their Paris projects. I do.

The gift yourself or gift another whose Paris project dreams are dear to you with dance.

Off the top of my head, you can hook up with Regard du Cygne, of course, but also Micadanses or Atelier de Paris – there’s professional training with the likes of Peter Goss or Su Jeong Kim or Liz Santoro or Ruth Childs or Loïc Touzé or Tatiana Julien, but also workshops for everybody, kids, adults, beginners.

La Fabrique de la Danse has put together a unique business-like approach to dance performance with four training programs for would-be creative entrepreneurs: Programme Chorégraphe, for developing choreographers and dance companies; Manager de projets chorégraphiques et artistiques, setting up and managing creative projects; Sur la Route, going international with a dance project; and Lancer son projet artistique, launching your creative project. Click on the link above or write [email protected] or call + 33- 1 84 79 45 34.

If your Paris project Kairos is immanent, that is, if you’re actually in Paris in Winter 2024, stretch and strengthen the pleasure of being there with: join me in following the doings of the Théâtre de la Bastille or even in just thinking about the sense of live performance theater and theater performance. I am using the 2023-2024 season at Bastille to get a sense of 40-something new director Claire Dupont’s artistic and esthetic direction: within the sense of her art and esthetics is a broader in-process generation change – gender, culture, all that.

In addition to quality theater performance pieces coming up to rival wonderful stuff like Mémé or Le Nouvel Homme orBlind Runner or The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, Bastille has upcoming dance by contemporary-krumper Nach, (re-?)doing her first piece, Cellule, as a sort of repertory piece, and two choreographers I don’t know, Laura Bachman, Ne me touchez pas, and Mohamed Toukabri, The Power of the Fragile.

Also, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet lately for Jean Christophe Boclé.

I think you should, too; increase your joy and good humor quotient through esthetic experience. Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’automne 2023 program featured a public rehearsal of his newest work ...est au delà... (“… beyond…“). The piece is there with a truly moving live sound weave of honors to Chopin and Webern by pianist and composer Orlando Bass. I discussed the fine depth of Boclé’s work last year (More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects", Jean-Christophe Boclé). I wrote him into “the camp” of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – as in them, there’s science in Boclé: sounds and patterns (not “words” and “music”), genetics, electromagnetisms, quantum foams. That’s to say, he seems to know how the use the organic complexity and function of real bodies, the neurology shared by performers and spectators alike, in dance performance.

Join with me in anxiously waiting for a ...est au delà... premier sometime somewhere soon; I find anxiety smooths out the usual worry about the Malabar Front and the chocolate ration.

 

Scott Price and Sarah Mainwaring, “The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes”, Back to Back Theatre Co., Théâtre de la Bastille, December 2023. Photo © Kira Kynd

Being here with, you should look to experience the 2024 Faits d’hiver program; just subscribe for the whose caboodle – 15 January to 9 February and all over the Paris region; it’s the next to last Faits before a … change of guard? … I don’t know. Nobody does – beyond his country-house dream that, to my mind and thus far, resembles a bit a Paris project, I’m not sure Christophe Martin, founder and director of Micadanses as well as Faits, does either.

In his presentation of this year’s program – which features eight premiers, almost two-thirds of performances, by the way –  Martin underlined the importance of place in this year’s doings: physical space plus movement.

Always practical, Martin points first to big-cast productions such as Fabrice Ramalingon’s Frérocité or Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Ne Lâchons rien! (“Hang strong!”) the third part of his age-and-dance performance triptych, Bêtes de scène. You need stage volume for that!

But place is apparently also atmosphere, or, maybe something else… a right space? Above, I mentioned Nach’s doing her primordial Cellule at the Théâtre de la Bastille. If I understand Martin’s theory, the Théatre de la Bastille is the right place to observe Nach’s “growth” – Nach was just a kid when she made and did Cellule.

There are layers to this space and place stuff: Nach may have grown from a kid, but she is now a woman, a known choreographer of a hybridization of contemporary dance and hip hop that was then just her primordial approach to dance performance. That’s something the right space has to take account of. Right? Nach’s also there with Laura Bachman and Mohamed Toukabri, who are also part of the Faits d’hiver program and who are and which is also what you might call Bastille’s Claire Dupont’s own Paris project.

There are spaces and places within spaces and places within places and spaces here.

 

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

In a Paris project – whether in-waiting or in Kairos – getting out into the country and getting away from all the places and spaces within spaces and places layers can be essential to mental stability.

So, let me suggest that early 2024 is a good moment for exploring space, place and time past and present. Get up to Nancy to experience the last season of Ballet de Lorraine under the direction of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley.

The couple has got some of the best performance with their company that I’ve seen.

I’m especially looking forward to seeing what that means for Instantly Forever, effectively, their goodbye to Nancy.

They have surrounded themselves (and, it seems to me, their creative processing, too) with creators Marco da Silva Ferreira, Joachim Maudet and Ayelen Parolin. These three will work together with the Ballet’s performers to create surprise “hors d’oeuvres”. Repertory includes recent work by Maud Le Pladec and Alan Linder, both sort of “reality dance” creators, along with Trisha Brown’s Twelve Ton Rose.

Marco da Silva Ferreira is a choreographer who, if his C.A.R.C.A.S.S is any indicator, is minded to always get to the essentials of dance performance experience: in terms of style and genre, he just takes what he needs in service of effect. Da Silva Ferreira started out life as a psychologist; he’s wound up making interesting performance moments. In addition to the hors d’oeuvre, da Silva Ferreira is putting together a piece he calls a Folia (“Revelry”), around ecstasy. I saw Da Silva Ferreira’s C.A.R.C.A.S.S during the Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne this past Spring 2023,

Although Joachim Maudet and Ayelen Parolin have very distinctive styles and, perhaps, performance-experience aims, I find there’s a certain shared légèrté in the approach of both. I can be sure that whatever they come up with for their hors d’oeuvres will be fun and surprising. Beyond that, I can’t guess.

Parolin, like da Silva Ferreira, will be presenting a creation he calls Malón (“Crowd”) – it’s their first time working with a whole troupe (the Ballet de Lorraine has 24 members). I saw Ayelen Parolin’s popular WEG at the Atelier de Paris’ June Events 2020 and Joachim Maudet trying out a performance concept at Etoile du nord in 2022 and his Welcome at Regard du Cygne’s Signes d’automne 2022.  

Santé. Bonheur.

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

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.

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.