The Best American Poetry

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom of Music and Mister! James!! Brown!!! put tang in Olympic B.battles [By Tracy Danison]

"Mon petit coeur imbécile", hip hop drama directed by Olivier Letellier. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

These damned Paris Olympics 2024 are like the Vichy regime, splashing mud even on Virtue’s shoes.

All the same, the Olympics give me the opportunity treat myself to a check-in à propos with top break dance performer and hip hop choreographer Valentine Nagata Ramos. I last talked to her almost two years ago.

Valentine has long had an interest in developing child-centered hip hop tales. She’s just completed the choreography for the theatrical adaptation of  Xavier-Laurent Petit’s now-classic children’s book Mon petit coeur imbécile (My silly little heart) directed by Olivier Letellier. Mon petit coeur is currently premiering with Les Tréteaux, a well-known summer theater festival in the Paris region.

Valentine’s big big job over the last couple years, though, has been evaluating potential B.girl and B.boy contestants on their home grounds, as prelude to the first-ever Olympic break dance competition, to be held at the Paris 2024 games.

She says brightly that in the last couple of months there’s been a strong tang of B.Battle in the air.

“Maybe it’s because everybody now feels the games really will happen”, she says, or, maybe, “Because now everybody can use their own music”. She explains that until recently, music rights were still in negotiation, so Olympic entrants couldn’t be sure that their choices were validated for coming battles. It’s an important point. She mentions or mutters her own B.girl affair with Mister! James!! Brown!!!.

 "Mon petit coeur imbécile", hip hop drama directed by Olivier Letellier. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

I think I may say that, in Valentine’s view, without Freedom of Music, Freedom to Break is mere fiction. She’s certainly not alone. Music and movement go together like horses and buggies or birds and bees, and, very often, gorgeously so: think of Madison Chock and Evan Bates figure skating to Dark Side of the Moon.

But, until the moment of my chat with Valentine, break dancing and James Brown had never shared the same space in my thoughts. They certainly will now.

In fact, there’s a lot to this sudden cohabitation of break and Mister! James!! Brown!!!, not just Valentine’s or my personal memories of dancing to his incredibly stimulating music.

Mister! James!! Brown!!! links the post-segregation America of Hair to global hip hop.

That’s the idea behind the  Give it up or turn it loose dance clip collage by Zay Visuals, for instance. Then, Brown sustains and directs a consistently high energy level: the athleticism of break dance, in Nairobi, in Tokyo, in Jakarta. Then, Brown’s will to own the body: the complex precision of break dance, in Brooklyn, in Rio de Janeiro, in Paris. Then, Brown’s determination both to be there with and be the music unite contemporary and break dancing, the one as presence, the other as existence. And vice versa.

And more still. Involved in Valentine Nagata Ramos and I sharing a memory of Mister! James!! Brown!!! is my sharing of sensibility with a woman half my age (and hers with a man twice hers) and a person of life experience as close to utterly different to my own as Japan is different to Spain and Bagnolet, France, 2024 is different to both and to Somerset, Somerset County, Ohio, USA, circa 1965, to boot.

Maybe I will after all amble on down to the Place de la Concorde to the break competition on 9 and 10 August … in honor of Mister! James!! Brown!!!

Fusions upon mixes upon global bits and bobs: "Behind The Line" by Malik Djoudi, Anne Nguyen, Joris Avodo [By Tracy Danison]

“Behind The Line”. Photo: Courtesy Le Carreau du Temple © Anaïs Costet

Behind The Line is an audience-pleasing, intelligent meta-political live performance dance hit put together by musician Malik Djoudi, choreographer Anne Nguyen and dramatist Joris Avodo.  Savant, collaborative and fun to watch, Behind The Line is contemporary live dance performance that shows what live performance experience can be and can serve as a pattern for what will be coming as performance genres continue to mix and fuse.

The set for Behind The Line is inside a broad play space – a big gym floor essentially – a rectangle delimited by white tape laid down for the occasion within Carreau du Temple’s main hall. Spectators are on bleachers on either side with DJ, sound and light and other tech at one end, public and performer entry on the other.

Watching from the second row of the bleachers, between, above and below a couple of just post-teenage women, one or two families with toddlers and teeny-boppers, completed by a range of 20-30-somethings, Behind The Line resembles a social situation more than a story line. My perspective has been influenced by the very strong reaction of the toddlers and pre-teens. They struck me as unusually attentive and interested in the show. The audience in general was rapt, even those who had charge of toddlers!

Whether or not it is an intention, Behind The Line seems to roll out in three parts, pass through three situations: an individual, an individual and relationships with other people, intra-group relationships. Performers range in age from pre-teen to thirty-something, and include one girl and one woman, whose gender is not emphasized, though the competent air of the woman cries “mother”, “wife”, “sister”, at least to me.  A strong drift of sound and rhythm that evolves but never seems to break creates a gravity of sound over which Behind The Line rolls out, not exactly background, but not a driver or prompter, either.

“Behind The Line”. Photo: Courtesy Le Carreau du Temple © Anaïs Costet

In situation #1, a single man is the first to walk onto the set. He wears a multi-loop gold neck chain, drawing the eye. His dance stretches him between floor and ceiling, radiates weight and weightlessness; Krump-style, he stamps a foot from time to time. He is joined after a while by what appears to be a family group, situation # 2. On entry, the “siblings” fall in around the first man, watch, follow and respond to him, create a second situation: constellate into solos, duos, and small groups, center themselves, it seems, around the man. Situation # 3 commences from here: complex responses that range into “battles” – that illuminate each person’s stuff - there are breathtaking break moves, especially footwork, and acrobatics, but also a great deal of personal expression and gesture for themselves and among themselves. At the end of the dance and interaction, my sensibilities have been turned toward friendship and redemption.    

Like any break dance you’re likely to see in the street, Behind The Line is a collaboration of auteurs: a dramatist, a choreographer and a musician, each finding their place in a concert of movement in a concept or vision.

“Behind The Line”. Photo: Courtesy Le Carreau du Temple © Anaïs Costet

Theater performer, screen and play writer, habitué of collaborative and multidisciplinary and multimedia creation, Joris Avodo embeds a narrative of exile and equality – as per Carreau du Temple’s vision of a “show that uses urban dance, music and personal stories to put human equality at the center of art” – that comes out as both as coherent phrasing and evolutionary shifts in emotional tenor within the choreography as a whole.

B-girl, author, choreographer, promoter and producer Anne Nguyen over the past 20 years or so has become a hands-on intellectual of cultural integration. The last time I saw a Nguyen creation, in 2022, she was working with performers on a piece called Matières premières, contemporary dance, Africa-optics. Nguyen’s strong hand is evident in the piece in both authenticity and on-target fusion of genre. Authenticity in a savant mix of hip hop and contemporary Afro-urban dance that binds four 20-30-something professional urban dance performers from France from her own company and four 9-15-year-old B-girls and B-boys from a village in Benin. On-target fusion in her combination of contemporary and urban dance (exemplified by the Krump performance).

With an ability to mix and match sound from every music niche and make it a treat for any ear, the newly-named artist-in-residence at Carreau du Temple, the music press has lately been calling Malik Djoudi France’s new prince of pop.  In Behind The Line, the sound track is a fusion of Idaatcha traditional music (the B-kids grew up in this tradition) and contemporary electro-pop.

Put Behind The Line on your bucket list.

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I saw “Behind The Line” a dance performance collaboration by Malik Djoudi, Anne Nguyen, Joris Avodo at Le Carreau du Temple on 22 June 2024. Choreography: Anne Nguyen/ Original music: Malik Djoudi with collaboration with the traditional musicians of Camaté-Tchakaloké, Benin/ Dramatization: Joris Avodo/ Costuming assistance : Didier Boko/ Adult performers: Mark-Wilfried Kouadio alias “Willy Kazzama”, Joseph Nama alias “Jo Kiero”, Tony Ndoumba alias “Tonynoscript”, Emilie Ouedraogo alias “Lady Madskillz” / Child performers: Frejus Attoukou, Jean Gbadi, Salomon Gbadi, Assiba Otta/ Costumes : Ludivine Maillard.

Child performers for “Behind The Lines” are part of the cooperative dance exchange group “Enfants des Collines” created by the Association Irilojù of Camaté- Tchakaloké, Benin, and Association Fondament’ALL of Champigny-sur-Marne, France. Sylvestre Otta is France coordinator for Irilojù.

From saying to moving, with music: Simon Feltz’ “Echo” [By Tracy Danison]

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

Being Paris Correspondent for all arts beyond words, you’d naturally expect I see a lot of dance performance and I certainly do. So many that a lot of what I admire and think worth pursuing gets left in the folder awaiting Resurrection, just like the rest of us. So starting now, while I’m thwacking my magic wand against different style hat brims, muttering invocations to The Mother and testing incantations to tease out the Black Nail of murder love in preparation for the 15 August Exorcism of Putin and a Call for Normal Life, I’ll also be raising up some NAMES for Best American Poetry Beyond Words Empire of Deeds bucket lists (#BSTAMRNPTYBYDWRDSEMPR&DDS).

In notes on Echo, his third independent dance performance choreography (following on Abyme and Phase), Simon Feltz  writes that he uses “correlations” of conversation and body movement to amplify the sense and musicality in language. As a spectator – enjoying the piece immensely – I felt it the performance as just the opposite of that: Echo reminded me the meaningfulness of words, music and gesture has its source, is generated by, body movement.

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

But movement chased out whatever narrative intention there may have been, leaving a feast of movement that begins, ironically, because Feltz goes so very deliberately about establishing a set of gesture and sound that, taken together, promote a unity (“correlation”) of music, language and gesture that should in turn create the possibility of varying intensities of the sense of an overall narrative.

From my seat, Feltz’ choreography worked like this: every move every member of the quartet made was controlled and precise – which makes sense if the choreographer is thinking that certain movements correlate with words and phrases. But it doesn’t make these movements words and phrases. Controlled precise movements with no label on them are just precise movements, attractive both because I can see performers control them and because I see them as precise.

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

And then performer movement doesn’t seamlessly correlate with sound (music); in Echo it sometimes seems to follow, sometimes, break, then, even lead or shape the rhythm according as to I read the tensions (emotions) of the dancing bodies. Music and body rhythm relationships are ephemeral constructs of movement and the things of movement: tension, speed, positioning. I’ve danced Gangnam Style as Zumba, Rock and a sort of Afro-hip hop Pogo with no ill-effect. I hope you have, too.

All this is no criticism of Simon Feltz’ choreographic work; I’ve already said I think it’s brilliant; see Feltz' work if you can. Rather Echo points to a poverty in discourse about dance and, by the quality of its focus on movement, to the vital importance of coming to some critical understanding of it.

_________________

“Echo”, dance performance by Simon Feltz

Performance venue, Carreau du Temple, 29 September 2022/ Performers: Pauline Colemard, Adrien Martins, Anthony Roques, Chloé Zamboni/ Music: Arthur Vonfelt/ Lighting: Thibault Sack/Production: Elissa Kollyris

June Events 2024: a living handbook for [a movement] art engagé [By Tracy Danison]

“La Probabilite du Neant”, by Alexandra 'Spicey' Landé. Photo © Gabriel Paquin

Last Saturday was the last day of June Events 2024 dance performance festival at Atelier de Paris, at the Cartoucherie arts center in the Bois de Vincennes.

I came early to experience Françoise Tartinville’s Vibrations Cosmiques, performed by Paris and suburban conservatory dance students and amateurs meant, according to the choreographer’s note, “to highlight the infinitely grand and infinitely small invisible links that hold us all together…”.

Also, I came because of a previous experience: for my money one of the best and most successful performances of the festival was Opéra du Villageois by Zora Snake. Sacred act, dance, opera and agitprop wrapped into one Opéra is a tour de force by artists who know their business.

In the contrasts of bright sunshine and early shadows of evening on the Cartoucherie’s rough lawn, the snaking, dissolving and resolving of Tartinville’s Vibrations’ dance forms charmed me. The spirit of it came through my ear – not usual for me – with a soundtrack that begins with Hair’s “Ain’t got no”:

Ain't got no home (So)/Ain't got no shoes (Poor)/Ain't got no money (Honey)…

and ends with its “I got life”:

I got my tongue/Got my chin/Got my neck/Got my tits…

Put aside that the two songs brilliantly echo New Age references such as Lao Zi, Buddha, Jesus, Thoreau and/or Walt Whitman, among others, and that the 1967 musical references every item on today’s socio-cultural issue list as well as all the issues named in the June Events 2024 festival note, Hair was the first live dance performance I ever saw. A Revelation. And between “Ain’t got” and “Got”, the soundtrack featured artists and styles that seem to me to straddle every year from Revelation to the present moment. Among other rappers, I thought, figured 50 Cent and Notorious B.I.G.(?). The fuckingmotherfuckingcocksuckingdesperation of the former calls up my army days and the painful discovery of my angry son as teen-man, the latter, the much later death of a favorite brother in the New Mexico desert.

Taken together, my experience of Vibrations Cosmiques shows pretty clearly at least four reasons why I believe Dance is the primal art: it operates in the flow of visible and invisible space, in the present moment and in the past, belongs to everybody and is totally and ineffably intimate.

Tartinville’s piece, which was outdoors and free, and two other equally distinctive dance performances capped the festival, recalling in form and substance the range and depth of three intense weeks of dance performance. At 7.30 pm, in the intimate Atelier de Paris auditorium, Dona Lourdès, a solo by Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma, a moving conférence dansée (“danced learning”) around the story of the woman who played Mira in the 60s film Black Orpheus as seen by herself, now a grandmother and interpreted by her grandson. At 9 pm, in the large Aquarium auditorium nearby, was Ayelen Parolin’s Zonder, a hilarious three-person physical comedy cum dance movement deconstruction. 

Anne Sauvage, director of the Atelier de Paris, who put together the June Events 2024 program, is quoted as having put together a “resolutely xénophile and inclusive” program that “runs the gamut of creative diversity” to reflect deeply on, among other topics, social and culture racialization, post- and neo-colonialism and intergenerational transmission in a context of culture tension, war and climate change. And this with artists from three continents.

 

“Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna” by Soa Ratsifandrihana Photo © Harilay Rabenjamina

With its free workshops and participative and professional initiatives in and around the community and more than 20 dance performances, June Events 2024 has above all created a living handbook on how to do dance performance (or movement art) as “art engagé” for today.

At sight, I messily divide the June Events 2024 Handbook into two categories of dance experience: “On Ballet for Today” and “On the Logistics of Movement”.

By “On Ballet”, I mean dance performance focused on using a sustained form of sense (coding) to bring spectators along – like classic ballet once did. As “form of sense” or coding, I am thinking hip hop and TV tropes (See BAP/Beyond Words: J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie : Straining every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia). In a certain way, I think, Ballet-type pieces can be understood as a type of contemplation.

By “On Logistics”, I mean work focused on the regulation of the flow of movement within a performance and toward its destination. In other words, a piece strikes me most strongly for its originality, for how it happens and allows a spectator to become a participant in its sensibility.

About five performances straddle both categorizations – they “made me” watch them and struck me by how they happened.

Over the next couple of weeks, as I prepare my Real Presence, Exorcism of Putin and Call for Normal Life (BAP/Beyond Words, 26 June 2024) my stern poèsie de geste aimed to send World-wide Armed Reaction REELING BACK to the grisly Shadows from which they have Emerged, I’ll be writing about certain of these examples of [a movement] art engagé: how some may be ballets for today and others, models of flow, sensibility and Imagination models of making dance performance happen.

Beyond the Handbook, though, as far as I’m concerned, June Events 2024 proved above all and beyond all reasonable doubt that physical proximity, artistic professionalism and clear-eyed intelligence in dance performance are a path – maybe the only path – to get beyond words and get toward the (re-)Imagination of the world we now so urgently need.

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Performance thumbnails

I was not able to experience all the performances at June Events 2024. What follows is a quick take on those I was able to. I plan expanded reviews for certain more exemplary pieces later on.

On Ballet: Dona Lourdès and Zonder, which I’ve already mentioned, but also Vania Vaneau’s gorgeous Heliosfera, which managed to show this spectator and his companion an electromagnetic wave, saving us a possible costly trip to the Large Hadron Collider in wildly expensive Geneva, Switzerland; Alexandra 'Spicey' Landé’s La Probabilité du Néant (“The Probability of Nothingness”), which I immediately dubbed “Elmo Swan Lake” after the famously abrupt Muppet, truly, perhaps, the Beggar’s Opera of late capitalism; Arthur Perole’s Tendre Carcasse, dance as theater performance, which explores the symbolization of the body; Idio Chichava’s Vagabundus, an African chorus, shards of voodoo, politics and poverty revolving around human vibration...

On Logistics: Aliféyini Mohamed’s Shido, a solo that gets in the skin of autism; Pierre Pontvianne’s  Jimmy, capturing the emotional truth of a body; Sonya Lindfors’ Something like this, anatomizing hip hop as a code for life; Myriam Soulanges’ and Marlène Myrtil’s performance dance Tropique du képone, using dance to attitudinize a political story…

Straddling: Clara Furey’s Unarmoured uses actual sexual rather than symbolic movement to represent itself: fucking as romance instead of romance suggesting fucking, a Sex Ballet, if you will; Marie Orts’, Talia de Vries’ and Roméo Agid’s, Contre-forme mixes athletic form and gesture along with player and spectator attitude and emotions to build a lovely dance tableau; Zora Snake’s absolutely brilliant Opéra du Villageois, political theater, spiritual experience and wonderful dance; and Soa Ratsifandrihana’s Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (“Comparison, Transmission and Rivality”), hilariously flawless social analysis of immigration and social integration and a very seriously constructed dance performance happening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballet de Lorraine performers

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

Static Shot

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

Malón

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

Click for Ballet de Lorraine in Europe, Summer 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he says, with emphasis.

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine  

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gigantic symphonic crash makes me jump.

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

The floor of the stage is mirror black. 

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

Saturation.

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

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

I notice the music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look up.

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

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

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

The applause begins. The lights go up…

I come away, touched.

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

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

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

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

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

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine

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

______________

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

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

Twelve Ton Rose (Trisha Brown)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

4 and 5 May, Le Hangar Y, Meudon

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

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

Màlon, new creation & premier (Ayelen Parolin)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

1 June, CCN d'Aix-en-Provence

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Morocco tour, Instituts Français du Maroc

5 June, Casablanca

6 June, El Jadida

7 June, Rabat

9 June, Meknes

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival Freestyle, Paris

22 and 23 June, La Villette,

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

Festival de Montpellier Danse

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

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

5 July, Soirée Merce Cunningham, Opéra Comédie

CRWDSPCR, RainForest, Sounddance

15 July, Bolzano (Italy) Danza Festival

Sierras, Danses Atmosphériques (Michele di Stefano)

Static Shot (Maud Le Pladec)

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

Discofoot (Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley)

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instantly, thus, Forever.

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______

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

Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:

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

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

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Jérémy Meysen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Agnès Mellon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The important thing is to move.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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