The Best American Poetry

"Fireflies in Tights": On Balanchine's Agon [by Eden Elieff]

Ed note: This is part two of a series. Find part one here. sdl

Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in "Agon""The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1957.

Agon. What the hell was that? The program revealed that agon is a Greek word, meaning contest. Okay, but how do you pronounce it? Short a like apple? Or long a like acorn? It didn’t dawn on me that agon is cousin to agony: short a then.

This scene began NYCB’s week-long Ravinia residency:

The stage is bare, devoid of even a minimalist Godot-style tree. Four men in white Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and black tights appear. They walk upstage, place themselves equidistantly from each other with their backs to the audience, their curved arms extended downward— an image of grace. They pivot in unison to face us. Before the music starts, they move as a unit, doing simple steps at first—walking, feet angling inward and then out. They, not the orchestra, begin the piece.

A few counts later, the musicians blare a brass fanfare. The men engage in familiar steps, a plié, feet in first position. They strut across the stage in lockstep to the music’s rhythm. But immediately, Balanchine inverts the classical lines. The feet turn inward. Legs extend off-balance. Chests protrude beyond “elegance.” Heels flex upward on the floor, anchoring the leg. Arms swing casually. We’re in “West Side Story” territory, which also premiered in 1957.

Two minutes later, eight women in “practice clothes” uniform—pink tights, black leotard—enter. The urgent music borders on angry. They attack the beats, matching the tone of the music, and explode in jumps and turns, as if on a trampoline, sometimes in unison and sometimes following each other a count or two later: a visual fugue. Always moving, they create a stream of patterns: architecture in motion. Balanchine’s choreography unspools seamlessly, insistently, to the music’s flow.

The ballet continues for eleven more movements—trios, solos, full ensemble, and most famously, a male-female duet—and reveal shapes, patterns, and a kinetic dynamism I’d never seen before. There are no explicit guideposts that help you absorb the ever-churning complexity of the rhythm, tempo, and musical phrases these dancers literally embody. You can’t anticipate the progression of synthesized sight and sound, the amalgam of the past with an unchartered present, of this blend of grace and angularity. I could see the ballet a hundred times and still not understand how the dancers mastered its rhythm, still incapable of internalizing the choreography’s trajectory. The dancers are fireflies in tights. And all I wanted to do was catch them.

                                                            *

So what was the contest? Were the dancers really antagonists? Or were they protagonists, a group of equals exploring this new world? Balanchine was recasting old forms and contexts into an avant-garde vocabulary, but was he framing them as adversaries, as the title suggests? Don’t think so. This was a friendly face-off, an invitation to discover that evolutions embody the sources from which they emerge. The “contest” between eras is implied, inherent in the choreography’s unfolding. The ballet’s plotlessness might feel revolutionary. But for me, “Agon” declares that the imagination’s ability to transform the dimensionless medium of sound into a three-dimensional locomotive, is the greatest ballet plot of all.

Yet there is a basic scheme.  Several of the twelve sections are based, loosely, on 17^th century French court dances: the branle, galliard, and saraband. Balanchine called the other sections after the number of dancers in them.

The late Arthur Mitchell, who originated the pas de deux, revealed that it was the first section Balanchine choreographed. Thus it was the ballet’s centerpiece, though chronologically, it was the penultimate section—the climax of the preceding ones. And you wouldn’t be wrong to see a sexual context here. The choreography’s six minutes involve an intimacy that ranges from a simulation of court dancing—slow, processional movement—to serpentine entanglements that look lifted from the Kama Sutra. Sometimes there’s not much “dancing” at all, if dancing is continuous movement. Rather, there’s a blossoming of consecutive poses that suggest images on Greek amphora or the mirror images of Rorschach tests.

But in 1957, the choreography was almost beside the point. Arthur Mitchell was black. His partner, Diana Adams, was white. Interracial marriage was not legal throughout the US. It took a full decade later for Loving v. Virginia to settle the matter. Yet Mitchell and Adams enacted this choreographic coupling as if the only thing missing was the certificate.

Ultimately, if there are opposing energies here, it’s the failure of words to convey the full impact of this visceral, ephemeral experience, which, as we’re verbal creatures, is indeed a kind of agony: Dance, kaleidoscopic in form, always resists our ability to communicate its spell. Three-dimensional movement doesn’t readily translate into the abstraction of language. So, are all ballets agons? Maybe Balanchine in his sly way trying to make a universal statement about his art.

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Ed note: Here is former NYCB principal dancer Maria Kowroski on Balanchine’s AGON

This season, the NYCB is celebrating the 1972 Stravinsky festival with a series of special performances. Find the schedule and buy your tickets here. 

Musing Terpsichore at the Regard du Cygne: “Ma Robe” on the blood-red Recamier [by Tracy Danison]

Zoe Salmon performs “Ma Robe”, Regard du Cygne, Paris, 8 March 2020, Photo©Morena Compani

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”.

                                                                                        - Isadora Duncan

The moment bizarre is not over, of course, until live performance starts up again and this here (now) fat boy loses the five pounds he put on during lockdown. Still, in all, what with the salutary correction in the Weltgeist and a change in direction in categorical imperatives, things do seem to be looking up.

As I have since mid-March I spend long periods on the blood-red Recamier, golden pillow under my head, hearing my heart throb and gazing at the ceiling. My own analyst. My own analysand.  As I lie gazing, my Persönlichergeist has often been full of Isadora Duncan, the (re)founder of dance in the modern world. Yes, she is.

Duncan’s autobiography and Jérôme Bel’s Portrait dansé of Isadora Duncan, wonderfully done up by the excellent Elisabeth Schwartz marked me in 2019 as did the performer Ruth Childs, dancing her first solo, fantasia, who gets mixed in with my reflections on the sense of “dance” sense.  

The last venue I was at before the lockdown in mid-March this year was Regard du Cygne, a dance-performance theater space in the Belleville neighborhood, metro Télégraphe or Jourdain. Amy Swanson, the founder and guiding spirit of the place, like Elisabeth Schwartz, is a practitioner of dance in the Isadora Duncan tradition. One of the last things I saw performed at Regard du Cygne was Swanson’s piece Ma Robe (“my robe, my dress, my gown”). Robe’s wordless universal sense and personal sensibility in performance recall what I’ve been thinking Duncan is all about.

Blood-red Recamier with golden pillow

In her performance of the piece, Zoé Salmon enchants the audience by elegantly uprising her approximate six feet through about 30 yards of heavy gown fabric. She somehow gets across both complex senses of “becoming”: “right and lovely” and “evolving”. And, thereby, somehow, she opens up a vision of the becoming world for witness.

But really, the success of Ma Robe – the sense, it seems to me, to Duncan’s idea of dance – is its ability to appeal to a shared conviction that, “danced”, a robe-dress-gown points to the centrality of self – yours, mine, their – in our world.

Everybody – I, my companion, Karine, the little girls sitting behind and around me, their moms and dads, as well as the other adults in the audience, recognized and accepted that Salmon’s rising so personally, so elegantly, up through Ma Robe was (is), really-truly, the universe becoming.

Real  invitation. Photo: Ana Belén Cantero Paz

Terpsichore’s – and Duncan’s – art treat a level of complexity Aristotle and Thomas Carlyle just never imagined. What happens at “dance” (maybe at all live performance) resembles what Saint Augustine said could only be true at the Eucharist: the wine and bread are body and blood, the gown is the universe, the thing represented is the thing itself.

So, as at a Eucharist, Ma Robe’s audience’s shared conviction of witness is not dramatic, is not theatrical, has nothing to do with a “suspension of disbelief” to achieve catharsis, the necessary evacuation of the emotional toxins generated by a set of beliefs. Think of the psychic poison generated by the beliefs that underpin Oedipus the King! Motherfucker!

When we witness “dance” as Isadora Duncan meant it, on the other hand, we are connecting with our capacity (and responsibility) for the sets of belief that construct the world we live in. Think, “connection” and “identification”: kids playing house or a toddler echoing words, trying out a relation or a tool or just trying out the capacity to construct a reality.

So, here is a post-moment bizarre conclusion from the blood-red Recamier.

Before the moment bizarre, I would have said that Isadora Duncan understood my life is movement is dance. No more. I now say that Duncan took “dance” for granted as Emily Dickinson took “poetry” for granted, as Ralph Waldo Emerson took “personhood” for granted. As it never occurred to the (re)founders of poetry and spirituality that poetry might be a function of “language” or that a human being could be other than her own subject, it just never occurred to Duncan that “dance” was other than dance. Terpsichore’s name, after all, means “delight in dance”, and her iconography, sitting with a lyre held up as if a portal, invite her admirers beyond sight and sound to vision and feeling.

Still Time to Watch NYCB Digital Spring Season: BALLO DELLA REGINA & AFTER THE RAIN PAS DE DEUX [by Stacey Lehman]

In an ordinary year, my sister Amy and I would have been poring over the New York City Ballet catalogue in March to select which ballets to see in the coming month. We've been regulars for decades, and going to the ballet with Amy is one of the sisterly activities that I look forward to with much pleasure. A few years ago Amy gave me her collection of ballet programs, some dating back to the 1970s, and I can get lost in the memories aroused by going through them.

The virus intervened and, here we are, the 2020 season cancelled. But thanks to the creativity and resourcefulness -- and, yes, desperation -- of the NYCB leadership, the company has launched a digital spring season, for which it is sharing videos of recorded performances. A new program is announced every Monday and the programs go live on Tuesdays and Fridays with each remaining available for 72 hours. 

Which means you have until tomorrow night to catch Friday's program (see above). Now is not the time to hesitate, and here's why: even if you've seen these programs live, as I have, you have much to gain from watching the videos. I've watched Friday's program three times. The first time I did so unselfconsciously, with no expectation other than to assess whether the experience would be enjoyable on its own terms. The second time it was to pay close attention to the choreography and the talent of the individual dancers and to be more attentive to my response. The third time I got to deepen my understanding of why I was so moved by the performances. (I don't know why it delighted me so much to observe the geometric shapes created by the intersecting arms of the corps at around the 14:30 mark. And Anthony Huxley's seemingly effortless jumps and turns left me breathless. His landings are as quiet as a cat's.) Obviously a live performance does not allow for such a deep dive into a ballet and one's reaction to it. 

For the third viewing of Ballo De Regina, I pulled down from my bookshelves "Dancing for Balanchine" the memoir by the prima ballerina Merrill Ashley, on whom George Balanchine created Ballo in 1977. She likens the ballet to champagne, so the next time I watch it I'm going to pour myself a glass. (Couldn't do that in the theater!) With Ashley's book in my lap, I could pause the video at any time to read Ashley's accounting of how she and George Balanchine, along with her partner Robert Weiss, worked in close collaboration over the course of a week to complete the early versions of the ballet. Most fascinating is how she breaks down certain of the steps to their component parts. For one who is, as I am, passionate about ballet but not a trained dancer, and lacking the specialized vocabulary of dance, I recommend reading these passages and studying the accompanying illustrations. I can look forward to the next live performance knowing I'll have a greater appreciation of what I'll see. 

Megan Fairchild has stepped into Merrill Ashley's role in Ballo Della Regina and she is a wonder. (Hot tip: follow Fairchild on Instagram (@mfairchild17) to catch her series of interviews with friends and colleagues in the ballet world). She executes Balanchine's steps with razor-sharp precision and at warp speed yet paradoxically seems to take her time doing so. I challenge anyone to follow the progression of foot work during her solos. Ashley describes how the challenging steps became second nature to her, freeing her "to revel in the music and in Balanchine's 'fantastic' creativity." I suspect that Fairchild feels the same way. Once the formal elements are mastered, a dancer's intelligence and imagination take over and they are free to let loose, to make the ballet their own. 

A new program will be announced tomorrow. I can't wait. 

--sdl

Valeria Giuga. How’s a 60s rockstar to be done on Airstrip One? [by Tracy Danison]

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris

I found myself feeling slightly shamed to be clapping so hard and enthusiastically at the finish of Valeria Giuga’s clever and thoughtful dance performance Rockstar at Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Around me, too many fellow spectators showed off that peculiar form of un-enthusiasm that signals disapproval rather than, say, disappointment.

The mechanics of Rockstar work well.

It has all it takes and not too much of it, either. Rockstar is easy to enjoy.

The Rockstar scenario, its light, music and choreography all roll out smoothly.

An amorphous musical frame doubled by a soft-light visual frame supports a heavy-duty weft and warp of three danced all-time hit-parade toppers: Papa Was a Rolling Stone (The Temptations, 1972), Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode, 1989) and Fame (David Bowie, 1975). Giuga consistently creates an atmosphere that is playful and not-quite distracting, not-quite hypnotic …  

Come to think of it, her creation manages to evoke an emotional something very much like what rockstars create, at least the ones I’ve seen on TV…

Finally, a professional in full possession, Valeria Giuga dances supremely well. If her choreography got me thinking “rockstar”, her personal style got me feeling Peter Robert Auty’s version of “Walking in the Air”.

We’re floating in the moonlit sky/… I’m finding I can fly so high above with you/…

Suddenly, swooping low, on ocean deep/Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep!

Resentfully, I redoubled my enthusiasm.

It happens to me often enough that I don’t appreciate what those around me seem to. Also, like other people, often enough I can’t say why I can’t appreciate a perfectly well-constructed piece.

The point of live work, after all, is that it’s fully and directly relational: feeling and sense before, during and after performance count. Like psychoanalysis, the underlying scenario of live performance is Life, capital L.

Sullenly mulling the contrast between my enthusiasm and other spectators’ un-enthusiasm got me associating that, when I was a little boy, I also used to feel shamed that neither of my grandfathers had gone asoldiering.

Feeling shamed is a fact, a natural fact, like fun.

A sculptor told me with a straight face he did wood because there warn’t no metal on Tobacco Road. He then threw back his glass of sparkling wine, with feeling.

I was born on Airstrip One. There shame and honor reigns. Going for a soldier was – to echo the Barry Goldwater slogan – a duty, not a choice. In those “post-war” days – before active shooter drills – cringed under my school desk, my cowardly trembling as I breathed hot and quick the air of Victory, Fire, Ash and Dust of the second world war shamed me too.

Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Mrs. Needoh, the fourth-grade teacher, worried aloud whether the nearby Vulcanized^Ò rubber factories had adequate ack-ack. Feu my brother was shamed for telling me, That woman is crazy. Was he shamed because he spoke out of turn, said the shaming phrase to littler boys, called Mrs. Needoh that woman or called Mrs. Needoh crazy? Yes, obvious, chastisement, inevitable.

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

On Airstrip One, as victory is ashes, as success is just darn successful, time is as a seamless garment.

Seamlessness makes the present appear an obvious inevitability – shaming them as might not see it right off.

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris 

Like lubricious Lenina’s zipless overalls, on the brave new world of Airstrip One, seamlessness facilitates successful pneumatics, whether worked on you or by you. Either way, it’s shameful to say.

Shame is as shame does. Seamlessness facilitates natural doublefeel by creating the past as just another unconscious space in which to displace the inconvenient part of mixed emotions.

Mixed emotions are also a fact, a natural fact. Seamlessly joined with the present as Eve to Adam’s rib, on Airstrip One the Past is that damned spot on a favorite dress concealing the ecstasy of unexpected love in a fog of anguished expostulation.

The glow of the Past is the waste heat of contradictory emotions, the product of doublefeel, feeling one thing while knowing everyone else’s feeling, one’s own racially-healthy feeling, must be true.

How can one personal feeling be so much at odds with obvious, inevitable Airstrip One?

What was that unnameable natural fact that kept my grandfathers – limber, stiff, generous, miserly, gruff, bluff, suspect, upright malchiks – from bounden duty on the Malabar front?

So was it that I felt shamed as I clapped hard for Rockstar; I was not of them but must feel with them even now that that I no longer have the energy for it. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

The point is that Rockstar doesn’t rockstar as it must. That’s where the un-enthusiasm comes from.

Rockstar (plural rockstars)

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity
2. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment. 
3. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renowned amongst others of its type.

                        "Owls are the rockstars of the bird world".                                                                                                                                  - Wiktionary

Good show it may be but Rockstar does not feel “rockstar”, as a fixed term, an icon of canonical parts. Indeed, until that moment of shame and un-enthusiasm, I wonder if anyone had thought that this natural facts of the 60s had canonical parts.

Try these citations for rough analysis of what I mean:

“Rockstar”

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity status : Papa Was a Rolling Stone ’s most salient line is “… and when he died, all he left us was alone”.
2. A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment : Personal Jesus hints at, among other unsavory stuff, commercialized dependency with, “Lift the receiver/ will make you a believer/ reach and touch faith”.
3. Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renownedamongst others of its type: Fame brings together you and he, megalomania and nowhere: “Fame, makes a man take things over/ Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow /Fame, puts you there where things are hollow”.

                                "Vultures are the rockstars of the bird world."

Freddie Mercury? Mick Jagger? Cher? Patti Smith?

Maybe I and my fellow spectators discovered the dissonance all together and all at once, I feeling shame and they feeling sour. I can’t know.

What I can say is that Rockstar raised in me an interesting past and many interesting feelings that make it; it did that for my fellow spectators as well: Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia? Is that good? Or bad? And how is it?

For me, that’s certainly art or part of it. For that matter, so is my feeing shamed.

Remember that Australian bush hunter in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park?

Just before that frighteningly intelligent velociraptor rips him to hamburger, he admiringly grunts “Attagirl!”

Attagirl! Valeria.

 

 

 

Happy Birthday Mr. B. "I didn't train her, she trained me!"

Born January 22, 1904.

Choreographer George Balanchine with Mourka. Photo © Martha Swope. 

Photographer Benoîte Fanton’s dance vision: Get on up, hold on! [by Tracy Danison]

"L'Arène", from Don Quichotte de Trocadéro: Choreographer: Jose Montalvo/Performers: Sandra Mercky, Patrice Thibaud/Venue:Théâtre National de Chaillot, 2013

Monsieur Loyal commente

la ballerine s’évente

et pique la piste

en vrille

rouge banderille

                                              (MC Gayffier)

– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through

The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.

I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).

Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.

So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.

The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.

Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.

At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.

I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.

I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.

Get on up. Hold on.

Quote of the Day: Prima Ballerina Tanaquil "Tanny" Let Clercq

“Souffles fall and so do dancers, and both survive: The main thing is to forget it.” 

                    from The Ballet Cook Book by Tanaquil “Tanny” Le Clercq

-- sdl

Witness a unique début with Ruth Childs’ “fantasia” [by Tracy Danison]

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

When my boy was very little we would be walking along and he would suddenly stop dead, quivering like a pointer, point at this or that, cry “Behold”. Where he got “behold” from is a mystery. The this could be a dog with a torn ear, a pigeon with smeared rainbow in its wings, the that a gang of louts emptying a van, a woman pushing a stroller. Whatever it was, my boy was moved, really moved by it. So, we’d spend the next while looking silently and intently on, trying to penetrate the mystery of this dog’s ear, that pigeon wing or those louts, that woman.

He was apprehending, as the philosophers put it, the thing of itself. He was moved by the new feeling of – realization? wonder? enchantment? before the wide world. He was pointing that unique something that I look for when I say I am looking for beauty in art. In his “behold” he was a creator. Through him I could access the emotion of experiencing a thing new in the same way that I do when I confront of work of art.

The other day at the Atelier de Paris, Ruth Childs’ performance of her fantasia, a new creation, gave me a “Behold” moment, a chance to feel the emotion of witnessing something unique, made me a little boy apprehending the wide world.

This sounds exceptional, I know, but it’s what she somehow does. “Somehow” because Childs’ achievement is just not entirely explainable, though, whether it is set, light, sound, costume or gesture under scrutiny, everything in her performance is in place and (consequently?) in time. And I guess timing – in its kairos sense – developing then seizing the right moment, is what brings the spectator to the edge of witness. What makes her step over the edge to witness is in the “somehow”.

“fantasia”, Ruth Childs©Marie Magnin

Childs’ fantasia performance re-informs Beethoven’s dramatic symphony and relights the felt-images of Disney’s gorgeous animation by situating revealing jets and swirls of educated, emotive and elegant movement between them. She catches the spectator up in alternate forms of both: as music and image, memory and moment, as image and music, moment and memory.

Total command of stage/choreography support the performance.  She begins stretched out in the right-hand angle of a visual triangle induced by a stack of primary-colored costumes front stage and a white heap bottom stage. The effect is to force the eye from her long, exposed thighs to her human center: to be with her as she moves and possesses the stage, possesses the music, possesses the spectators with the art of her senses.

So, centering on her center, mastering the art of set, pointing here to a crash of sound, there to a wave of color, Childs somehow enables unique witness.

To behold.

fantasia – Dance, Performance • November 2019 • Ruth Childs • Atelier de Paris, 12-13 November 2019• Α Ruth Childs has studied in the US and Europe and has been based in Geneva, working with choreographers such as Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Childs has been renewing the repertory of the well-known post-modern choreographer Lucinda Childs (e.g.,Calico Mingling, Katema, Reclining Rondo, Particular Reel), who is her aunt. With Stéphane Vécchione, Childs’ made her choreographical début in Paris in 2018 with The Goldfish & the Inner Tube as part of the Atelier’s annual June Events festival program. Ω Choreography: Ruth Childs / Performers: Ruth Childs / Lighting and technical management: Stéphane Vécchione / Outside choreographic consultant:  Nadia Lauro / Costuming: Cécile Delanoé / Production: SCARLETT’S, Tutu Production Ruth Childs calendar

 

 

 

 

Ballet de Lorraine’s “For Four Walls” puts a mirror to Merce Cunningham’s palimpsest [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobsson/Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

Histoires sans histoire(s) is an intercalation of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s For Four Walls and Merce Cunnigham’s Fabrications and Sounddance, staged at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais de Chaillot) as part of the Festival d’Automne’s celebration of the centenary of the celebrated choreographer’s birth. Jacobsson and Calley are co-directors of the Ballet de Lorraine. 

Whatever Fabrications and Sounddance may say about Cunningham’s genius, Histoires certainly is (yet another) proof of the Ballet de Lorraine’s excellence as re-creator of old stories and creator of new ones.

For Four Walls opens the old story: Fabrications and Sounddance follow. With 24 performers dancing within mirrors that double and triple or quadruple movement, with pianist Vanessa Wagner perched over a single grand set two-thirds off-center stage flawlessly executing John Cage’s pure chord within a single sound, the company re-creates the “lost” content of Cunningham’s Four Walls, creating Histoires sans histoire(s). They put up a mirror where by looking straight ahead onlookers also see what is behind.

 

Merce Cunningham, “Fabrications,  Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Bernard Prudhomme

The arrangement makes Histoires work visually and psychically as a palimpsest does, showing everything all at once but also as single units, as if each thing were written on distinct, separated surface. Just as with a palimpsest, despite a saturation of apparently random positions of words and ideas, the eye and brain always know where they are as the spirit explores the potentials.

In the mirror Histoires holds up, I saw that the recursive palimpsest of Fabrications and the chaotic sensuality of Sounddance are not meant only as a questioning of dance forms. They are also as a statement of physical or psychic truth. And looking in the mirror provided by Jacobsson and Caley, I could see and feel the newness that is Cunningham play out. I could see how he empowered me as onlooker to create or “find” for myself the infinite filigrees of sense in the art of human movement: to create my personal palimpsest of Cunningham's famous 64 underlying figures (by coincidence the same number of underlying figures as the I Ching).

 

Merce Cunningham, “Sounddance”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

And, as the remarkably talented dance performers of the Ballet de Lorraine in the mirror before me sprang for themselves, sprang for and with each other, moved apart from and towards, through, to, one another, sprang inside themselves, as I gave these doubling men and women a pattern, as they gave each other and themselves a pattern, I felt absolutely certain that “random”, “recursion”, “synchronicity”, “dissociation”, “association”, “coincidence” are all the same damned thing, all as solidly linked and as eternally true as any reality that I can kick. I swear that I texted that to a friend while still sitting gazing at the empty stage where Histoires sans histoires had been. 

Histoires sans histoire(s), was created as part of the Festival d’Automne 2019 Merce Cunningham Centenary celebration and produced jointly by the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, Théâtre National de la Danse-Chaillot, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Festival d’Automne à Paris. It was staged for the first time from 12-16 October 2019 with the usual technical-esthetic verve of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.

From Eroticism to Extinction 8 | 83 | 22 | 00 | 44 [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

8 years | 83 days | 22:00:44

I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).

After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.

The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).

In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.

The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:

Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.

The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling. 

This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.

We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”

The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.

Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”) 

Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."

Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.

Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.

Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.

This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.

 

Every morning, my phone tells me exactly how much time has passed (2019 years, 10 months, 9 days, 8 hours, etc) since some god-like dude was born in a manger. It's standardized for our global techno-capitalist economy, and accurate enough for high-frequency trading—but is it helping us survive?

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96

 

My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?

 

 

Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."

Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here

True News from Paris: eight well-loved performances [by Tracy Danison]

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker talks through "Violin Fase", Lafayette Anticipations 2018 © Tracy Danison

Over the next couple of  months I would like to report True News on creators and performances worth looking out for. A concept for a True News Mechanism came to me during the most recent unprecedented heat wave.

An individual whispers his or her sensory experience into the True News Mechanism’s reception trumpet. True News processors use the same COBOL X12-49A algorithm that enabled Jesus a smooth resurrection. Forty acres of glistening brass tubes offer honest whisperers designer glimpses of those dark gears that grind toward the True. Mechanism engineers heave suspect fabulators into the relentless mesh. There they go from being parts of the problem to being parts of the solution.

Metaphorically speaking, Hang Huang, who runs the English-language dance and travel blog DanceVisa, Catherine Zavodska, a culture influencer who heads up DanseAujourdhui, a dance-appreciation community that offers culture-oriented events and tourism, along with myself are the first persons to whisper into the Mechanism.

Catherine and Hang have a deep and abiding love for dance performance. Hang seems always to see where a performance is coming from, has the knack of seeing where the depths and weights of a performance lie. Catherine has more useful knowledge about dance than I could ever hope for; she always knows how to measure creative effort and execution.

With the aid of Catherine and Hang, the Mechanism and myself can report its first eight bits of True News from dance performance: eight well-loved pieces from the Paris Season 2018-2019. These include Ohad Naharin’s Decadance, performed at the Opéra Garnier, Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood, performed at La Villette last Winter; Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, performed at the at the Opéra Garnier last Fall; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Violin Fase, her initiation piece revolving around Steve Reich’s music of the same name, danced by Yuika Hashimoto,  renewed last Fall at Lafayette Anticipations; Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer at Atelier de Paris in Spring 2019; and Damien Jalet’s Vessel, also last Spring; Noé Soulier’s exceptionally moving, almost-baroque Les Vagues, produced at the Palais de Chaillot last Fall; and Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon, equally last Fall at Opéra Garnier.

Catherine Zavodska and I both well-loved Cherkaoui’s [Après-midi d’un] Faun[e]. The piece got me thinking about how Maurice Béjart and Rammallzee (‘The rhythm [dance] that breaks’) find shared culture space, but Catherine saw an orgasm in it. She is surely closer to Nijinksky’s intention. Her idea is that Cherkaoui has a talent for working performance “movement” from the ground up (as in break-dancing) then pushing it beyond “choreography” to discover (experience the unknown of), or uncover (experience beyond), a “real thing”, in which the performance is a visual, physical and emotional meeting point of spectator and creator intention.

Oona Doherty dis-covers a new continent of emotion in Northern Ireland © OonaDoherty

The Mechanism has identified four, including Faun, of the eight well-beloved pieces as visual, physical and emotional real things. Catherine delighted in Decadance, performed by the junior rank of the Opéra de Paris ballet, calling it “true” thing with “neither beginning nor end”, outside of time, as “a letting go”,  “a jubilation”. Touched by the deep realness of the performance, the Mechanism observes, last year I wrote of Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon “… Way down there where once was Hell, I saw a man picking up a woman and knew that picking Karine up just like that [would make] her mine forever.” And. Ahh, God. There’s Noé Soulier’s Les Vagues. The choreographer’s sense of poetic schwerpunkt is penetrated and perfumed by the consistent kairos of movement. My performance note reads: “… and suddenly she says, gesture like an Egyptian – gestures that emphasize, underline, give meaning to her words rather than be words:

I begin to long for/A language lovers use/ Broken words

Inarticulate words / Like the shuffling of feet/ On the pavement

I have to tell you, it still makes me cry.

A burgeoning real thing also lies behind a focus on the particularness of a performance.

Catherine, for instance, sees “choreography” as the mesh of music and movement, not just movement with or to or around music as I often do. So, Cherkaoui’s achievement in Faun would be more about completing Débussy’s erotic impulsion than, as I feel it, about fleshing out the sense of Mallarmé’s poem. When Hang speaks of the performance of Violin Fase that he attended as “exceptional”, he is also using a particularity to speak of achieving a real thing performance. He points to de Keersmaeker’s “danced commentary” as key. Injured and unable to dance herself, as originally scheduled, de Keersmaeker came on to the performance floor to talk with spectators in the wake of the Hashimoto’s 15-Minute performance. As she talked, her movement physically, visually, emotionally doubled Hashimoto’s dance; she effectively (re-)created it as a “real thing”.

Critical focus, the Mechanism suggests, can even switch from the performance itself to the experience of uncovering or discovering the real thing. Hang characterizes Oona Doherty’s Hard to Be Soft - A Belfast Prayer as a “discovery” by display of impressive ability and energy. That’s entirely on target. Doherty, whom I discovered myself at her exceptional pictogram-performance Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2016 is a stochastic calculus of Hollywood musical, avant-garde contemporary dance and cinéma noir altered for performance theater. It puts across an extremely powerful performance-pictogram of the emotional state of Northern Ireland’s humans.

Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood and Damien Jalet’s Vessel can also be looked at as real things uncovered or discovered. Vessel, according to Hang, uncovers “a new genre” of dance performance. Hang feels that Jalet, known for innovative scenography (Skid, which featured at Palais de Chaillot in the Fall, very nearly literally had performers dancing (vertical) on a wall) creates a new body language that pushes the performance into a thing identifiably new.  Queen Blood, according to Catherine, discovers a “conductor” within a choreographer. The all-women cast of Sy’s piece is made up of distinct individuals (so much so that I, for one, “forgot” their status as female and “remembered” their status as individual during the performance.). Sy’s choreography and directorial approach conduct rather than direct or manage the performers of his cast, solo and together. That is to say that under Sy’s “baton” each performer is a separate instrument of distinct sound and role, uncovering dance movement as corporal music.

For each of us, these eight pieces were True News, real things that you can share through our eyes. Mark the Creators on your bucket list as talent worth seeking out and the performances as new eyes to see through they made just for you.

Paris performance rentrée: new creation, classic music and creative retrospectives [by Tracy Danison]

Jan Martens, Sweet Baby Sweet © Klaartje Lambechts

If you’re a trillionaire trying to reward my good looks with a hefty check, in September and October you’re likely to find me at one and the other of the dance and performance pieces in the Paris Performance Calendar, hands on knees, attentive to doings on the stage. The federative performance arts Festival d’Automne and big, or dance performance-dedicated, institutions such as the Théâtre National (Palais) de Chaillot or Micadanses always offer a good range of dance performance as a new season opens. Most, if not all of my September and October picks are taken from such 2019-2020 Season calendars. 

Through to December, there’s Festival d’Automne’s celebration of Merce Cunningham’s contribution to modern dance. This makes for a prime opportunity to see France’s excellent provincial ballets strut their excellent stuff. There is an instructive bent in the offer and with it an opportunity to brush up on the principles of modern and contemporary dance as you enjoy the dancing.

My head has highlighted intriguing retrospective work by the well-known choreographers Jérôme Bel and Philippe Decouflé. Without ignoring such emotion-masters as Saburo Teshigawara performing things like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (recommended by DanseAujourdhui’s Catherine Zavodska, at the Philharmonie de Paris) or the erotic tension of Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat, my heart has chosen creation by artists whose esthetic power I admire, including Yasmine Hugonnet, Myriam Gourfink and Latifa Laâbissi or such artists as Florence Casenave, Carole Quettier or Nina Vallon, whose work I have not yet seen but whose performance ideas tease my esthetics. Vallon, along with Aurelie Berland, among others, are movement artists whose work makes up a really intriguing offer of new creation riding classical music and choreographies for Micadanse’s Bien Fait! 2019 program.

Jan Martens’ Sweat Baby Sweat and the playful exploration of Yasmine Hugonnet’s Se Sentir Vivant both feature in Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 program. This contrast of approach reminds me that Echelle Humaine is both quality live performance and a visual treatise on how movement creates or shapes physical space – and vice-versa.

Yasmine Hugonnet, Se sentir vivant, 2017© Anne-Laure Lechat

Again in the spatio-human vein, the very talented saxophone-clarinet-piano guy Antonin Tri Hoang and 12 musical companions will be turning the vast volumes of Saint Eustache’s Ship-to-Heaven architecture into a jazz soundbox. The performance will also provide a good moment to explore the old Halles parish church, far more of a conscious work of art than Notre Dame and which harbors Raymond Mason’s 1971 Le départ des fruits et légumes du coeur de Paris, le 28 février 1969 (“The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris”) sculpture in a side chapel.

Looking past the September-October listing, Paris’ performance offer for November and December is easily as solid but also perhaps more esthetically intriguing than that of September-October. I’m thinking here not just of the ongoing Festival d’Automne program (lots of performance from La Ribot as well as dance from Merce Cunningham), but also Loïc Touzé, Liz Santoro and Daniel Linehan as dance performers at Théatre de la Bastille and new creations by Jann Gallois, Kader Attou and Système Castafiore at Palais de Chaillot. But really, especially I’m impatiently waiting on the program for the Kalypso hip-hop dance festival from 6 November to 17 December. In 2019, Kalypso, brainchild of performer, choreographer and tireless promoter of urban dance culture Mourad Merzouki, will feature work by 52 well-selected troupes in Paris and in cities throughout France. I’ll be paying particular attention to Kalypso and French hip hop/urban dance in 2019-2020.

Beyond hip hop and into Spring 2020, staying with just a few center city institutions, there’s reason to look forward to the contemporary dance performance offer, just for instance, at Théâtre de la Bastille or La Scala Paris or Atelier de Paris in Spring 2020. Bastille for example will be featuring such proven young talent as Sofia Dias, Vítor Roriz, Olivia Grandville or Madeleine Fournier, talen developed at the Atelier de Paris. La Scala will offer, notably, new circus performance with La Chute des anges (Raphaëlle Boitel, cie L'Oublié(e)) and Humans (Yaron Lifschitz, cie Circa) along with a reprise of the Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco Van Dormael’s absolutely brilliant Cold Blood (Collectif Kiss & Cry).

Click here to access the September-October Performance Agenda.

Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes [by Tracy Danison]

Catherine Diverrès, “Jour et nuit”NicholasJoubert

Paris is surely a bit above the best when it comes to fostering and presenting creative, innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance, including circus. But, what with Paris lately as hot and dry as Sana’a, Yemen, I have been a little slow to act on getting True Dance News out to the English-speaking world.

I’ve been wanting to put up a series of short, sweet articles on watch-for performers and performances such as Catherine Diverrès’ remarkable Jour et nuit, her latest piece, which I discovered during the Faits d’Hiver Winter 2019 festival. A reprise of a later work, equally smashing stuff, Blow the bloody doors off… figured at the Théâtre Nationale (Palais) de Chaillot in Spring…

In between, there was work by Liz Santoro, Sylvère Lamotte, Nina Santes, Nathalie Béasse, Vincent Thomasset, Mats Ek and many others at Atelier de Paris’ June Events and Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales… Diverrès, among others, is a veteran of the scene but there are scads of accessible, practicing newer talents, too, such as Marie Desoubeaux, to mention only one, who debuted her fine dance-performance Rester (Stay) in April at Le Regard du Cygne, a devotedly contemporary dance performance theater in Belleville.

So, there’s plenty of movement art to write about.

Stillness

But even innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance suffer from This weather!

Like most ordinary Parisians, like most ordinary Sana’a-ites, I expect, I have no air conditioning. The cost-benefit ratio has never added up for me or them. With actual waves of killing-heat, though, the ratio might change, ‘though maybe we can all just go stand under those giant white windmills that seem to run along the national tollways. That couldn’t be expensive, could it?

While we’re all calculating, however, the trick with a heat wave, in French called a canicule, just as in Sana’a, is to keep still in a shuttered-up apartment. The word for keeping still like this is se terrer – “go to ground” – like rabbits or scorpions or slugs.

Close the shutters a few minutes before the sun pokes its angry mug over the horizon. Don’t open them again till that mug has slunk well under it. Take only body-temperature liquids (‘though lovemaking is obviously out of the question at these temperatures). Keep quiet.  Move slow, mon lapin, lentement, shhh!

Poppies at 107°F July 2019 Sauliac-sur-Célé France©TracyDanison

Stillness, anger

Unlike typing or lovemaking, moderate reading or listening to the radio, in principle, doesn’t generate (much) heat, so I’ve been listening in the silence.

Celebrate Independence Day: Ballet not bombs! [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

George Balanchine loved America. This Russian émigré choreographer, who founded the New York City Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein, delighted in everything from the songs of George Gershwin to the city's ''Don't Walk'' signs.  When asked why he would choreograph to the marches of John Phillip Sousa, as he did for Stars and Stripes, Balanchine replied, "because he makes me happy." On January 25, 1981, just five days after the American hostages were released from Iran, Balanchine added "Stars and Stripes" to the program, as a special encore. It remains one of my favorite ballets. I saw it as a girl, with several of the original cast, and I remember my awe at the finale, when a giant Stars and Stripes is unfurled as a backdrop while the stage fills with dancers. The spectacle continues to "take the top of my head off" every time. 

It is in this country that Balanchine was able to make his great contributions to dance. It pains me to think that there might be other Balanchines waiting to get here so their gifts can find full expression on our shores. Here are highlights from Stars & Stripes.

-- sdl

Eva Yerbabuena on the ‘Arte Flamenco’: the magic within flesh and bone [by Tracy Danison]

“Carne y hueso” – Flesh and bone – Eva Yerbabuena’s most recent creation will feature in July at the 31st annual Festival Arte Flamenco, in the city of Mont de Marsan

If there are accidents, I quite by accident met my friend Wan in the street the other evening.

Wan is one those incredibly informed persons whose sincere modesty shames one to credulity. When I told him what follows, he remarked, “Ahh, you mean ‘transubstantiation’, cher. Abracadabra. Magic. Blood into wine, bread into flesh, like the Catholic Mass. You know, when the priest says This is my blood. This is my body. Poof! Magic. Surely it is.”

“Ahh, you mean ‘transubstantiation’, cher. Abracadabra. Magic,” Wan said

Later, on my way home, I read that the anthropologist Donald Brown says that all human beings, whom he calls “Universal People”, practice magic and dance.

So, I met the top Flamenco performer Eva Yerbabuena at a lunch, I told Wan; she sat across from me. I confided to him what a positively beautiful woman she is and I added that she is a perceptive bundle of presence, charm and animation. She moves like a well-mannered panther, I said; she isn’t fond of fatty foods, either, I remarked, as befits a person who has actually to work with her body rather than just use it. Eva Yerbabuena is a stage name. She was born Eva María Garrido García in Germany to Spanish Gastarbeiters in the years I was doing my army service there. She was early packed off to Spain.

During a short pre-lunch presentation of herself and the esthetic and cultural importance of Festival Arte Flamenco, Eva Yerbabuena plucks the back of her wrist, says that Flamenco is “carne y hueso” – flesh and bone, a vessel. The Festival’s artistic director, Sandrine Rabassa, interprets.

Carne y hueso is the title of Yerbabuena's newest piece.

When we sit down to eat, Eva Yerbabuena tells me she started doing Flamenco at 11. I learn later that her career began at 15. When I ask about it, she says Flamenco is the art of transmitting “the moment”. She plucks the back of her wrist and continues, explaining that “the moment” (within the vessel of carne y huesos ?) is the ecstasy created by the combination of Flamenco’s exactly precise (not intense) movement, percussive guitar rhythms and rough, acapella-flavored song.

Flamenco is the art of transmitting “the moment”, Eva Yerbabuena says

The moment “where I get goosebumps”, she concludes. Someone near me murmurs loud, “like an orgasm”. Sandrine Rabassa, still interpreting, hears the remark, thinks about it, with silence acquiesces. The people around me nod.

Eva Yerbabuena continues. The part of the professional in Flamenco, she says, is transmitting “the moment” even when she cannot herself feel the ecstasy in it. She pulls out her phone. She taps up a private video of a dozen or so African villagers stamping their feet together, like in an Irish clog dance.

That is Flamenco, she says, handing the phone around.

Eva Yerbabuena’s performances, along with such Flamenco dancers, singers and musicians as Maria Moreno, Joaquin Grilo, Antonio Rey, Diego del Morao, Maria

Terremoto, Inès Bacanor and Olga Pericet, make up the offering of the 31^st annual Festival Arte Flamenco from 2 to 6 July in the little city of Mont de Marsan.

Mont de Marsan, which, like so much of the French Southwest has strong and long-standing social, economic and cultural ties to Spain and the Basque lands, is an excellent place to start an exploratory tour of the one of this most charming region of France, lying on the edge of the flat pine-lands called “Les Landes” and by car about an 1.30h from Bordeaux in the north or Biarritz in the south and 2.30h from the lovely city of Toulouse to the West. In addition to a full calendar of best-quality Flamenco performance, the program turns around cultural participation and education, including dance training and local school activities, films, exhibitions and activities meant to expose the general public to the art.

Hip-hop in the performance puzzle: get a feel for it with Valentine Nagata-Ramos & François Lamargot [by Tracy Danison]

Photo©CédricSintes

Old wine in new bottles: “My Milk is Better than Yours”, the old story of mother love in hip-hop style by Valentine Nagata-Ramos

Hip-hop does a lot more than popularize, re-energize, enable and reference today's dance. The genre’s popularity and ability to generate esthetic energy is a translation of the primary and universal values of the liberal age: liberty, equality and solidarity.

Is there still break-dancing in front of (the shell of) Notre Dame? If not, you can always find it in front of the Grande Halle de la Villette. Sometimes there are kids there who are so good it makes you cry to realize just how good a body in movement can be…

Remember those “find stuff” puzzles for kids where they have to look for a person or thing hidden in a picture? The idea is to broaden and hone the visual imagination, I guess. I’m going to spend my summer (and Fall) doing broadening and honing my dance theory imagination, looking for hip hop in contemporary, modern and classic dance and dance performance and … in performance tout court.

It might not be so easy to discern the hip-hop element in the Opéra Comique’s take on Manon – though, come to think of it, Puff Daddy and 50 Cent could easily have written the story of social anomie, megalomania, brutality and shallow avarice.

However, as a first step, it will be child’s play, I think, to see hip-hop’s – esthetic, cultural and social – universality in the program of Festival XX sur 20 (“Twenty on 20- 100%- Festival). Child’s play, too, to see in Valentine Nagata-Ramos’ lively and lovely My Milk is Better than Yours just how good hip-hop is at the essential human itch to tell stories.

FESTIVAL XX SUR 20 • 2019 • François Lamargot & cie XXème Tribu • Day-long • Maison de la culture et de la jeunesse (MJC) Hauts de Belleville, Friday and Saturday, 28 & 29 June, 2019

"Twenty/20" is dancer and choreographer François Lamargot’s tribute to the Hauts de Belleville neighborhood and to the Maison de jeunesse et de la culture (MJC).

Hauts de Belleville, which is a part of the bigger Belleville neighborhood, is in the 20^th arrondissement and, mostly, still a place where ordinary folk can afford to live, at least if they’ve already got a roof over their heads.

The Hauts de Belleville MJC in particular and MJCs in general are a type of secular YMCA, present throughout France, town and country together, an outgrowth of the movement for popular and youth education, which began at the beginning of the 20^th century. Children in my own 11^th arrondissement neighborhood use their local MJC for activities ranging from ballet to fencing to karate to singing to fun-tilted science and arts education. Hauts de Belleville is where François Lamargot grew up and its MJC is where he learned to dance hip-hop. Also where he and his friends founded their performance troupe cie XXème Tribu.

Lamargot, who’s now worked with people like Anthony Egéa, a very early hip-hop adopter (1984), the very heterodox dance performer Blanca Li and urban dance popularizer and current director of the hip-hop oriented MAC Créteil, Mourad Merzouki, has developed his own form of contact dance based on hip-hop principles. He now advises, teaches and performs across the world – doing dance workshops in francophone places such a New Caledonia or Haiti.

MY MILK IS BETTER THAN YOURS • 2018 • Valentine Nagata-Ramos & cie Uzumaki • 60 minutes • Théâtre du Fil de l’eau, Pantin, 7 June 2019, 20h

My Milk is Better than Yours©CédricSintes

While Festival XX sur 20 shows off hip-hop’s social universality and cultural relevance, next door in the near suburb of Pantin, choreographer and performer Valentine Nagata-Ramos  – product of a father from Japan and a mother from Spain who elected domicile in France  – shows how apt an instrument hip-hop is for telling our old and new stories. Here’s hoping she one day gets a crack at Manon Lescaut!

Keep in mind that, in my opinion, anyhow, the mind-blowing variety of “styles” of this dance genre actually represent aspects of the myriad human concerns more than any esthetic ideology.

These styles go from expressionistic psychotherapy – for example, Nach’s – Anne-Marie Van’s – take on the “Krump” style of hip-hop – to esthetic development as social movement (Nagata-Ramos has herself talked to me of Voguing: developing dance gesture out of modeling poses) to getting ahead (say, any old Hollywood dance entertainment shtick for entertainment’s sake), to doing necessary updating of our fairy-tale repertory. 

Nagata-Ramos’ My Milk is Better than Yours is a fine example of fairy tale informed by psychotherapy, a sophisticated little jewel of a contemporary-old story of mother love and motive, told with pure b-boy brio. It’s all danced to a t, by the way, by Fanny Bouddavong, Santiago Codon-Gras and Yanis Khelifa.

My Milk is Better than Yours premiered last year at La Villette as a new creation by the region-wide Kalypso festival set afoot by Mourad Merzouki.

So, whether you get to walk up to the Festival XX sur 20 or walk across the périph’ to see My Milk is Better than Yours, and whether you’re lucky enough to visit Paris or whether you’re in Tokyo or Shanghai or Lagos or Moscow, as you watch those boys and girls in baggies and baseball caps springing and gyrating in front of the local tourist attraction, ask yourself where it all came from and where it tends toward. Also, give ‘em some spare change.

PARIS PERFORMANCE AGENDA MAY 2019 [by Tracy Danison]

Paris Performance Calendar is a work-in-progress “dance syllabus”, complemented by essays, articles and interviews from The Best American Poetry and other publications. 

PERFORMANCES & CREATORS TO LOOK FOR ON THE ROAD TO SUMMER 2019 [by Tracy Danison] 

The run-up to Summer features many dance and dance performance and theater performance pieces that will figure in live programs into 2020.

L’ILLUSTRE THEATRE DES FRERES SABBATINI - theater of objects • 2015 • Yannick Toussaint - Cie Histoire d'Eux • 30 minutes • Théâtre du Fil de l’eau – 20, rue Délizy, Pantin, 18 May, 15h, 16h, 17h, 18h, 19h and 21h; 19 May 14h, 15h, 16h, 17h, 18h and 19h • 10e biennale internationale des arts de la marionette  Α The greatest plays of the ages on an traditional Italian stage just two-and-a-half-feet wide by collective Cie Histoire d'Eux,  led by Yannick Toussaint since 2005. Marionette specialists, Histoire has used many different approaches, including shadow play (Nasreddine et autres histoires - 2012), black light (Sale temps en eaux troubles… - 2013), and video and magic (Dans la bouche - 2018). Ω Director: Yannick Toussaint / Performers: Yann Berriet, Yannick Toussaint, Laurent Diwo, Agnès Briatte / Scenography: Yannick Toussaint, Charline Dereims with aid from Valentin Monin et Léo Taulelle / Graphic design: Laurent Diwo / Music: Ludovic Derrière and Jean-Nicolas Mathieu

Yannick Toussaint - Cie Histoire d'Eux performance calendar

TOUT SEMBLAIT IMMOBILE  – Theater performance • 2013 • Nathalie Béasse • 70 minutes • Théâtre de la Bastille, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 May, 18h30 • OCCUPATION#3 Α Continuing an exploration of the roots of her endeavor, Nathalie Béasse decocts a story of experts confounded and inexplicable transitions towards… narrative and, once again, the fear, gladness and magics of childhood. Nathalie Béasse’s creations include an extensive in situ series entitled mes petites météorities. All the works presented during occupations are based on previous creations except aux éclats, a work-in-progress. Ω Concept, script and set design: Nathalie Béasse in collaboration with, Étienne Fague, Érik Gerken and Camille Trophème / Lighting: Natalie Gallard / Music: Camille Trophème / Set: Étienne Baillou / Painting: Julien Parsy

ROSES – Theater performance • 2014 • Nathalie Béasse • 70 minutes • Théâtre de la Bastille, 21 and 22 May, 20h ; 23 - 25 May, 21h • OCCUPATION#3 Α roses is free adapation of Richard III, providing the instrument of translation from sensation and fairy tale towards examination of the human condition with an experiment in literary-figure role-playing. Nathalie Béasse’s creations include an extensive in situ series entitled mes petites météorities. All the works presented during occupations are based on previous creations except aux éclats, a work-in-progress.  Ω Concept, script and set design: Nathalie Béasse in collaboration with Étienne Fague, Érik Gerken, Béatrice Godicheau, Clément Goupille and Anne Reymann / Lighting: Natalie Gallard / Music: Nicolas Chavet and Julien Parsy

SOFTCORE – A HARDCORE ENCOUNTER • 2018 • Lisa Vereertbrugghen • 45 minutes • La Dynamo de Banlieues Bleues, · 22 & 23 May 2019, 20h  • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α Lisa Vereertbrugghen explores how the “softcore” (body) mixes it up with “hardcore”, the heart-seizing techno-style music that vibrâtes through a dancer at 200 beat per minute. With live music remixed with her own voice, she reonstitutes an expérience of a body that is porous, supple, ready to adapt in a poetic and analytic tableau vivant. Ω Concept, choreography and performance: Lisa Vereertbrugghen / Sound: Michael Langeder / Lighting: Vera Martins / Artistic advisors: Madison Bycroft, Sabine Cmelniski, Nestor Garcia Diaz

Lisa Vereertbrugghen performance calendar

CO-PULATION – Theater of objects   • 2019 • Fu Le - Cie Tetrapode • 60 minutes • ECAM - Théâtre du Kremlin-Bicêtre, 24 May, 20h30  • 10e biennale internationale des arts de la marionette Α Choreography working around the quest for differentiation - emotion, sensation, gesture - to escape solitude. Fu Le and the cie Tetrapode migrated from Taiwan to Paris and are known for their carefully elaborated scenography ; Fu Le is a performance artists as well as sculptor, author and photographer. His other dance performances include A distant land (2017) and Raining ropes (2015) Ω Choreography: Fu Le / Performers: Cie Tetrapode / Production: Cie Tetrapode ECAM Théâtre du Kremlin-Bicêtre

Fu Le performance calendar

STEREO • 2019 • Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – Cie Le principe d’incertitude • 50 minutes • MC93 – Bobigny, 25 May2019, 19h 30; 26 May, 18h • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α Stereo – performed by Liz Santoro – explores the interaction of movement and the signs that produce and surround it. As she dances her solo piece, a video feed allows the dance performer Cynthia Koppe to write and present her thoughts and feelings in real time from New York; a voice synthesizer enables Santoro to hear and respond to Koppe through movement. The complex of language-body-movement and mind through the filter of scientific notions is a fundamental theme of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s excellent work, which turns out to be among the most emotionally poignant dance performances available today. Ω Concept: Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard with Cynthia Koppe / Performer live: Liz Santoro / Performer distant: Cynthia Koppe Music: Greg Beller / Costumes: Reid Bartelme

Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – Cie Le principe d’incertitude performance calendar

NEAR • 2018 • Ballet Cullberg & Eleanor Bauer • 60 minutes • MC93 – Bobigny, 25 May 21h & 26 May, 16h30 • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α The performers of the Ballet Cullberg invite a choreographer to work provisionally with them and, after a trial period, decide whether to go on to finish the project. Near, a piece on gesture, the individual and the group, and the relation between a broad variety of subjects and matters and persons the result of this process. Ω Concept : Eleanor Bauer, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad & Yung Lean / Choreography: Eleanor Bauer / Performers: Ballet Cullberg : Adam Schütt, Anand Bolder, Camille Prieux, Daniel Sjökvist, Eleanor Campbell, Gesine Moog, Giacomo Citton, Katie Jacobson, Mohamed Y. Shika, Suelem de Oliveira da Silva, Sylvie Gehin Karlsson, Unn Faleide / Music: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad & Yung Lean with Frederik Valentin / Scene: Josefin Hinders with Linnea Birkelund  / Costumes: Pontus Pettersson/ Lights: Jonatan Winbo / Rehearsals : Lisa Drake

Eleanor Bauer performance calendar

WALK#3 • 2019 • Joanne Leighton • +/- 240 minutes • Starting points: Regard du cygne, Micadanses (near Saint Paul in the Marais), l’Atelier de Paris (at the Cartoucherie) and Canal St Martin – Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (Porte Dorée), 1 June, 17h • June Events • Walking, Anne Thérèse de Keersmaeker believes, is the purest form of dance. Walking is the first of our gestures that turns ordinary moments into intentional and unique movement. De Keersmaeker’s objective for last September’s Slow Walk was to “meditate” the urban environment and re-appropriate it. Joanne Leighton’s Walk#3 invites participants to consider “Step by step, what world are we making?”. The walk from the Regard du cygne dance-performance space, a bit over five kilometers, which I recommend, brings you through working class, gentrified and immigrant neighborhoods that represent pretty well Paris (and France) hors tourisme today. The walk is followed at 19h with the in situ performance 9000 pas (“9000 steps”) at the Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. Ω Choreography & direction: Joanne Leighton / Choeographer-performers: Lauren Bolze, Marion Carriau, Alexandre Da Silva, Marie Fonte, Marie-Pierre Jaux & Arthur Perole / Music : Drumming, Steve Reich / Sound: Peter Crosbie / Lighting: Sylvie Mélis / Costumes : Alexandra Bertaut / Set(s): Tovo & Jamil / Production: WLDN

Joanne Leighton performance calendar

RITUEL POUR UNE GÉOGRAPHIE DU SENSIBLE – Dance performance and installation, complemented with GÉOGRAPHIE CORPORELLE, an apprenticeship in touch • 2018  • Julie Nioche• 60 minutes/installation • Maison des Métallos, 2 June, 15h – 18h ; 3 June, 14h – 17h ; 7 June, 14h – 17h ; 8 June, 18h – 21h30 ; Géographie corporelle, 7 & 22 June, all day :  •  Α Julie Nioche’s dance performance installation invites spectators to become co-creators in a ritual in order to make their bodies their own country with a ritual that enables easy passage over their boundaries of imagination, psychology and perception. Accompanied by dance performers, up to forty participants use installations called “At home”, “On the way” and “From the center” that help them consider how they embody their bodies and relations with others. Miléna Gilabert created Géographie and is accompanied for the apprenticeship sessions and aided by Blandine Minot Stora, Cécile Brousse and Cécile Ravenel ; sessions last 20 minutes. The ritualization concept of Rituel has its roots in the experience of Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan, who founded Taldans, a theater research laboratory in Istabul in 2003. During the violent repression of the 2013 pro-democracy demonstrations in Turkey artist-activists such as Sizanli and Kaplan created meeting and assembly spaces that enabled continued human exchange and toleration in the midst of the violence. Julie Nioche is a dancer, choreographer and osteopath. She founded and heads up the association A.I.M.E., which looks to spread knowledge about the body to the general public and which has developed Rituel. Nioche’s other recent works include Nos amours (2016), Qu’est-ce qui vous amène? (2017), La taille de nos âmes (2018) and Rituel pour une géographie du sensible (2018).  Ω Concept and performers: Julie Nioche, Filiz Sizanli et Mustafa Kaplan / Music: Alexandre Meyer / Set : Laure Delamotte-Legrand with the aid of Vincent Gadras  / Installation management : Max Potiron

Julie Nioche perfomance agenda

From Summertime into Fall: dance, performance and… hip hop [by Tracy Danison]

PhotoCourtesy©Printempsdeladansearabe

“Soyons fous” by the Comorese-French hip-hop group Cie Tché-za combines traditional African dance, modern, contemporary and urban dance performance to tell a political tale for liberty, equality and solidarity …

Saburo Teshigawara closes the Atelier de Paris’ June Events 2019. Teshigawara’s rendition, with Rihoko Sato, of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot last year at the Palais de Chaillot left Karine wiggling excitedly in her seat and me with tears in my eyes.

Karine wiggled mostly, she tells me, because she agrees with Rihoko Sato that Teshigawara’s dance is unique and incomparable – a reflection of the choreographer’s insistence on the dancer’s coming to terms with his or her body in its particular environment before entering into the performance dancing. Karine loves straight-up balletic-style dance and the duo of Teshigawara and Sato did straight-up dance to perfection.

I got teary because Teshigawara showed me Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot, as I had felt him when I was 15 years old. Teshigawara was able to make Karine wiggle like an excited six-year old and do me like he did is because, I think, his choreographic accent is on performance – sense, posture, gesture – more than dance – accent, roughly, on: body, rhythm, sensibility. It’s not just the uniqueness of Teshigawara’s particular style, it’s performance that carries The Idiot forward, not dance.

And, ‘though Karine is often right and currently hotly disputes this judgement on Teshigawara’s choreography, just as she disputes my judgement on Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s mind-blowing (Afternoon of a) Faun, as surely as Liberty is the Genius of the Bastille, performance is the Genius of hip-hop.

Photo©BenjaminFavratCND2018

Hip-hop is so pervasive it no longer need be intentional and may be found where least expected. Daniel Larrieu’s renewal of “Chiquenades”, which he created then danced with Pascale Houbin and Michèle Prélonge for the Concours de Bagnolet (the precursor to Rencontres chorégraphiques) in 1982 and “Romance en stuc” featured at Avignon in 1985, are part of the offering Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2019

So, bluntly, I’m saying, without wanting to make a blunt declaration: hip-hop is as much a part of the secret of Teshigawara’s choreographic mastery as it is of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s. I’m saying much the same thing about hip-hop and dance today when I say performance pushes the programs for June Events at the Atelier de Paris - Carolyn Carlson or for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019, for Occupation#3 at Théâtre de la Bastille and …  for the 10e Biennale internationale des arts de la marionnette – “Tenth International marionnette festival”.

What I’ve said to Karine’s hot counter-arguments is a rather dry “Open your eyes”. What I tell her further is that if she’s opening her eyes wide and not seeing it, she’s missing another proof of the breadth, depth and pervasiveness of the African-American contribution to world culture.

Hip-hop popularity and physical performance standards put new life into old, and modern, and contemporary, choreographic wines. The energy and freshness of Cherkaoui’s (Afternoon of a) Faun wouldn’t be possible without the emotional codings of movement hip-hop enables  … Farid Berki’s troupe Melting Spot recently celebrated the choreographer’s 25 years in hip-hop by infusing a new and energizing formality into dance numbers ranging from chorus lines to musicals (all the while giving an enthusiastic and popular audience ranging from 7 or 8 to 80 or 90 a new way of understanding Haendel, Bach and Vivaldi) … then there’s hip-hop’s social universalism – its “accessibility”… Choreographer and dance

Photo©Laurent Philippe

Hip-hop is more than a masterful relationship with gravity’s heft: Mourad Merzouki’s “Vertikal” (Festival Kalypso, La Villette, 2018) shows it enables defying it

performer Jann Gallois, a favorite of mine, comes to mind – in fact, it was a conversation with Jann Gallois that really got me thinking seriously about hip-hop. For Gallois, despite a thorough grounding, repeated and victorious battles and little other formal training, hip-hop is just a port of entry to contemporary dance.

Whether, like Cherkaoui, renewing modern classics or, like Berki or Amala Dior (who opens June Events), doing “fusion” or, like Jann Gallois, doing contemporary dance or, like Teshigawara, making no particular claims at all, hip-hop is the choregraphic enabler.

Hip-hop is an entryway for contemporary dance and performance. Jann Gallois performs her contemporary dance-performance piece “Compact” in a brief retrospective of her work in February 2019 at Palais de Chaillot (Théâtre national de la danse), where she is an associate

Hip-hop takes in traditional and classical dance (and music) forms from any sublime corner of the earth and gives it a way to relate to whatever who, here and now it needs to relate to. … Hip-hop is the point of reference for all dance today – even “traditional” dance (viz., Varhung – Heart to Heart, in Avignon last year)… Hip-hop bears on contemporary and modern dance and dance performance and classical dance in the same way all these have borne on each other at one point or another over the past century and a half.

But hip-hop does a lot more than popularize, re-energize, enable and reference. Its popularity and energy are a reflection of a set of universal values. Just for an instance, take a look at how Amala Dianor (Parallele) or Oussmane Sy (Queen Blood) handles female dancers – their choreography uses the possibilities of the female body in their choreography, not the femininity of the performers. Now, take a look at any mixed group of break dancers …  So, behind hip-hop is one form of radical equality – non-gendered differentiation to you, Bub. So, now let us now look closely at and for this hip-hop that put performance and values into dance today the world over.

Tripping toward Summertime: dance, performance and … puppets! [by Tracy Danison]

Photo©FlorianRainer

Signs & portents A joint effort by Théâtre de la Bastille & Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson enabled Simon Mayer to tell the naked truth about folk dance with his sublimely absurd “Sunbengsitting” performance piece

Not dragons snaking through the northern skies, exactly, but there are signs and portents of a rich pre-Summer dance and performance offering to mull over during the long vacation. For instance, the programs for June Events at the Atelier de Paris - Carolyn Carlson, Rencontres choégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019 and Occupation 3 at Théâtre de la Bastille and … the 10e Biennale internationale des arts de la marionnette – “Tenth International marionnette festival”.

What threads dance, performance and puppetry (theater of objects) on the same necklace is object: subject as object, object as subject, the thing outside and the thing inside, myself and the material world. Chekhov says that if you bring a pistol on stage, you have to eventually stop talking and use the damned thing. Dance, performance and puppetry do just that, using movement to explore me-here and this-there.

Théâtre de la Bastille in joint production with Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson has recently presented a strong contemporary dance-performance offer. Expressionist movement pieces – including Hard to be soft, Oona Doherty’s gritty-real evocation of the emotional rigidity behind Northern Ireland’s “ troubles”, Shira Eviatar’s Body Roots/rising, recalling Israel’s multicultural heritage through a family portrait and Arab dance, Simon Mayer’s Sunbengsitting, a parody of (Austrian) folk dance and Nina Santes’ 

Photo©UrbanJörén

Signs & portents Choreographers and performers of the quality of Eleanor Bauer and Ballet Cullberg (“Near”) are part of the dance-performance bill for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019, 17 May – 22 June

plunge into archaic consciousness (Santes’ Hymen hymne is a happening as happenings should have been) – were themed around personal identity. Bastille continues what is essentially a performance program through June with “Occupation 3”, featuring creator Nathalie Béasse, essentially performance pieces done through the tradition of theater (rather than dance) that fold together the artist’s past, present and future with herself, her audience, performers and associated light and sound creators.

Photo©WilfriedThierry

Signs & portents Nathalie Béasse’s performance piece "Happy Child" uses theatric tradition to explore the artist’s past, present and future work. “Occupation 3” -Théâtre de la Bastille, 13 May -29 June, 2019

Since I personally like the dance pieces of so many of the creators, it may only be prejudice, but Rencontres chorégraphiques 2019 seems stronger this year than previously in what I have to call “straight” dance-performance – these days only a hip-hop billing guarantees an hour of hot shimmy. Choreographers and dance performers of the quality of Radhouane El Meddeb, Ballet Cullberg with Eleanor Bauer, the choreography-music team Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, Daniel Linehan, Daniel Larrieu and David Wampach grace the festival’s program. So I reckon this year it is dance – focus, roughly, on: body, rhythm, sensibility – rather than performance that has carried the day for the successor to feu Jaque Chaurand’s avant garde Le Ballet pour demain.

Atelier de Paris always focuses on new ideas and or new work, a focus that is especially obvious in its annual June Events festival. A prelude in early May features Prononcer FenanOQ, a work on the corporality and culture of French letters by Cécile Proust, a

Photo©CourtesyThéâtreMouffetard

Signs & portents Alice Laloy’s “Pinocchio(s) Live” renews the old tale of art become life with a cast of twelve young dancers as part of the 10 Biennale internationale des arts de la marionette, till 29 May

choreographer known for her work on gender, and Pierre Fourny, an old-school ranter poet who works on the forms of letters along with the sounds associated with them. The well-known performance choreographer Joanne Leighton, whose repertoire includes a focus on the relational qualities of ordinary movement – for instance, I am sitting in a room or Songlines – closes her residence on the first day of the festival with Walk #3 (starting in four different places in Paris) and the in-situ piece 9000 steps.

Nina Santes is 2019-20 Atelier associate and I expect her taste for happening will take over from Leighton’s movement contemplations.  

The June Events program proper opens with hip-hop-fusion choreographer Amala Dianor’s Man Rec (Wolof for “Just me”), followed by new pieces in premier by performers such as Aina Alegre, working on body cultures, Vincent Thomasset, developing staged production from in situ performance and Fouad Boussouf (a choreographer jointly featured with Printemps de la danse arabe#1 and the Institut du monde arabe).

Photo©BeeBorgers

Signs & portents Sarah Vanhee’s “Unforetold” is part of Atelier de Paris 2019-2020 associate Nina Santes’ all-night “Fictions” program, an all-night “performance-happening”, the creator’s contribution to this year’s June Events, 1-15 June, 2019

Nina Santes opens her residence the first weekend of the two-week festival with an all-night performed-happening of “transgressive fictions”: works-in progress, dance and performance pieces, sacralization through ritual, a supper-banquet and concerts. Her work is complemented by the intellectual contributions of quality-performance quantities such as Ashley Chen and new performance by creators such as Antonia Baehr & Latifa Laâbissi and Margot Dorleans.

June 2019 closes with works by the renowned choreographer dance-performers Saburo Teshigawara and Thomas Hauert and the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine and a free dance party.

Printemps de la danse arabe#1: noos, dishabille & diversity make for a powerful (sold-out) “Swan Lake” [by Tracy Danison]

The visual diversity of the Ballet national du Rhin’s company is a part of the success of Rhadouane El Meddeb’s emotional reshape of “Swan Lake”. Note the tutus still on the racks (right background)

When I was still constrained to see myself as just another bratty and ungrateful mouth to feed, left cheek sunk in left palm, I daydreamed a lot: of Alan Ginsberg’s radical demand for a paid up “I am”*, of boys like girls and girls like boys but-different-hey-ho, of revolution, of the national anthem on a djembe, of a Swan Lake in underpants. We brats used to snicker about underpants. It was a way of ripping off grampa’s whalebone collar, declaring Liberty Hall.

All devoutly-wished daydreams eventually come true. In a properly lived life, snickers eventually give way to a lightness of being. Marvelously true; deliciously light.

El Meddeb’s “Swan Lake” takes its inspiration from Nureyev’s 1986 interpretation of the classic 

Radhouane El Meddeb’s Swan Lake is proof of it. His piece catches the diverseand various performers of the Ballet national du Rhin in a gorgeous state of undress, just beside their racked tutus. He sets them undone, by no means untutored, to perform the essential lightness of Swan Lake: a stirring choreography of sensibility against sentiment, there-and-then against here-and-now, seeming against be.El Meddeb’s take works wonderfully well with the public. Seated next to me was an athletic teenaged girl whose intelligent boldness had struck me, so I talked to her. She said she was at a circus performer school and pointed to her classmates seated all around. How did she like Swan Lake? It was the first ballet she’d ever seen – her eyes shone. It was wonderful, she said.

El Meddeb’s Swan Lake, inspired, the performance note says, by Nureyev’s1986 Paris Ballet version, played in March at the Palais de Chaillot, as part of the very creatively successful Printemps de la danse arabe#1 program.

“Original silence” among the coffee cups

Printemps performances that rival Swan Lake in vision and intelligence include, just to name three outstanding pieces among at least eight excellent ones, Kawa, Aïcha M’Barek and Hafiz Dhaou’s brilliant piece around coffee, “the original silence”; Soyons fous, by Cie Tché-za, an (ironic) appeal to the curative power of madness; and Portray and Walking, sweet pieces by Shaymaa Shoukry that reinvest ordinary body movement with soul.

Kawa is pure body poetry made of slow thrust, tinkles, rustles and half-light set to music… or is the music set to it?

Though conceived with a boldly political theme in mind, Soyons fou is fine and disciplined contemporary dance shaping hip hop’s fureur divin. The dance troupe’s name, “Tché-za”, means “Comorian Urban Dance”.

Upcoming events of Printemps de la danse arabe#1 will include work-in-progress by Danya Hammoud and Näss (Folks) by Fouad Boussouf presented at the Atelier de Paris as part of its June Events dance festival and work by the Sareyyet Ramallah dance school at the CND-Centre national de la danse, in the near-suburb of Pantin. Both works seem promising and both are certainly worth a trip to the interesting settings of the Cartoucherie and the campus of the Centre national de la danse. Portray and Walking, along with Fighting, a work in progress around aggression and relation, are seamless, naturally-occurring fusions of contemporary, classic and urban movement. Shoukry says that dance in Egypt is shaped out of all available means, local and individual and foreign and formal, from the streets to YouTube to P.A.R.T.S. It may this that explains the exceptional quality of her performance.

Jérôme Cassou's Une Joie Secrète: Paris harlequin, Paris people [by Tracy Danison]

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

She claimed she was quitting but Nadia Vadori-Gauthier continues her one-minute dances – at this writing, she’s done a bit more than 1500, a full day plus an hour – since she began her ritual in the bewildered grief and defiance that followed the Charlie Hebdo mass murder of satirists by religious fanatics in January 2015.

There was always more than just marking the feelings of the moment in Vadori-Gauthier choreography – an effort to look again at Paris. Apart from being lively and lovely, Jérôme Cassou’s film Une Joie Secrète: Danser, un acte quotidien de résistance poétique,  (“Hidden Joy: dancing, a daily act of poetic resistance”).

Joie Secrète succeeds in discerning some new patches in the Paris patchwork and a new way of fitting Paris people into the urban esthetic. I say “Paris people” instead of “Parisian” because Vadori- Gauthier’s people are more witness than actor. In color, then, Joie secrete shows a Paris “harlequin” and, in among the stone, steel and glass of street and building, people.

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In color.  Joie Secrète shows that Paris’ urban fabric has been, is being, significantly nicked, slapped and splashed with bursts and dashes of primary color. Asked straight up after the screening, Vadori-Gauthier denied scenarizing them. As she says, she was responding to a cache of primary colors in the landscape, a lot of which, if not all, are from the decades-long accumulation of hard-plastic urban furnishings – think metro seats or trash bins but also all manner of coverings, frames, signs and electronic info boards as well as flowers and more adventurous taste in house paint. If you care to look, the primary-color harlequin Vadori-Gauthier is pointing to is there in the places and spaces, waiting, maybe, for its Caillebote.

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

In people. Set in ordinary places in the central city, Vadori-Gauthier’s short choreographies – those in Cassou’s film and those that are not – show a strong, not to say, unusual, complicity of performance with place. If most places are recognizable to someone who knows the city fairly well, Vadori-Gauthier isn’t dancing them, highlighting them, using the recognition value, like say Woody Allen does. Rather, her performances show her fitting into those places, inhabiting them rather than using them. The 2015 Charlie Hebdo and November 13 mass murders were seen as trying to drive people out of the city, take over. It makes sense that on one level Vadori-Gauthier’s Une minute de danse par jour is about owning and keeping the city, in the same way as the march for the Republic – “We belong here and we are not afraid”. But the Joie Secrète take on Vadori-Gauthier’s one-minute of dance suggests that the idea of “being part of the city” goes beyond ownership or citizenship.

As those sad mass-murderers reminded the world, ownership and citizenship can be disputed and even taken away, they are subjective and political, not objective and real.

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

If we make people part of the décor, as much a part of the city as the stacked stones, worked metal and glass, the rain gutters and doors, the trash bins and benches and the swatches of primary color, if we take them as objects as well as subjects, they become real too. Ironically, this realness is a belonging far more profound than ownership. As objects of the play we animate, Joie Secrète (and one minute of dance a day, too,) suggests, who can dispute our place in it?

"Une Joie Secrète: Danser, un acte quotidien de résistance poétique", by Jérôme Cassou is a selection of FIFA 2019 films about art and had its première at the Palais de Chaillot, Théâtre national de danse, Paris, in February 2019. “Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s one-minute dance numbers: “towards a sweeter way of living” featured in The Best American Poetry, September 2017.