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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s see how the challenge is met.

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

Betty Tchmonga, “Mascarades”. Photo © Queila Fernandez

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garçon! A drink for Madame!

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

Samuel Johnson defined “sensibility” thus (1755):

1. Quickness of sensation.

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

                                                                                        - Addison’s  Spectator

2. Quickness of perception.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverse engineering choreography to create dance [by Tracy Danison]

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative [By Sean Ashton]

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

                                                                                                – Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I’ve come across this quote more than once as an epigraph to novels, most recently at the beginning of Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Perhaps novelists are drawn to it because it sheds light on the business of writing fiction. Nabokov is discussing his mother’s religious faith – specifically, her conviction that another world lies beyond this one – but that ‘glimpse’ of ‘something real’ is also a good description of the wider world we subconsciously assume lies beyond the dreamscape of any novel. A novel is an account told from a particular perspective, but I’m surely not alone in feeling, as I read any given example, that there is another novel, an Ideal Platonic realm that subsumes it, an ‘ordered reality’ that could be reported transparently without the author’s idiosyncrasies. In fact, that’s the challenge facing the novelist: to convince us that this place already existed before they came along. This Platonic novel is pure moonshine, yet tantalisingly real: latent in every sentence of Middlemarch is an alternative Middlemarch that might have been written. Literary criticism probably has a term for this that I should know about. For all I know, there are exercises being done in creative writing classes as I speak, for which students were asked to rewrite the opening of Middlemarch. Individually, their submissions would perhaps lack the purpose of the original, but collectively they would constitute a virtual Middlemarch that might be worth reading.

I suspect the only good novels I’ve written show an acute awareness of this virtuality. Living in a Land, discussed in a previous essay in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words, is a fictional memoir of a man who can only construct sentences in the negative. Basically, the conceit is that the speaker, by describing lots of things he’s never done, is able to describe them more vividly than if he had done them. It’s all voice. Or rather, only voice. No plot or characters.

Courtesy Sean Ashton

My latest novel, The Way to Work, is more conventionally plot-based, but the structural conceit still allows the Platonic bedrock to show through. A man boards his morning train, only to find his normal 8:08 service redirected into unfamiliar lands. When he asks where the train is going the other passengers ignore him. The train is sentient, able to prevent him going backwards by sealing the sliding doors shut, once he has passed through any given carriage. Thus, it is only possible to go forwards. But progress induces amnesia in most passengers: the further they go, the less they remember of their past life. The narrator seems immune to this, and is therefore able to advance further. His initial intention – ‘to locate the Guard, reach the Driver’ – turns into a quest of epic and ultimately spiritual proportions, the ‘Guard’ assuming the status of God in most passengers’ eyes, the Driver akin to Christ. However, as he approaches the front, he realises this theology is misbegotten, a symptom of their amnesia. 

The train appears to be of infinite length, and as he passes through thousands of carriages he reflects on his job as a sales executive with a cat litter manufacturer, and on his relations with his colleagues, one of whom he suspects is also on board. He is seduced by a woman called Heobah, who is in league with a man named Marlowe, the two of them comprising the sole resistance to the locomotive regime of the 8:08 service. They persuade him that he is the right man to overturn the train’s unidirectional tyranny, setting him the task of obtaining Universal Dispensation, i.e., the ability to go both forwards and backwards. This, she says, can only be done by making contact with the Guard or the Driver.

However, the Guard, far from being in control of the train, turns out to be the 8:08’s most accomplished lunatic. He puts the narrator to work as his secretary, answering his personal emails – which consist entirely of spam. But the narrator escapes and succeeds in reaching the front of the train. A revelation awaits him in the Driver’s cab, but does he interpret it correctly? His concluding remarks suggest that he sees himself, not as a prisoner of the train, but as an extension of its physical character: the human agent of its ‘completion’. The implication is that he has entered a kind of Purgatory, doomed to repeat the same journey again and again.

I now see that this implied repetition is a veiled acknowledgement of the ‘alternative’ versions of The Way to Work that might have been written instead of the one I wrote. It seemed to me that the writing had to have a generic tone in order to allow us to imagine how the narrator’s journey might pan out a second or third time, perhaps in the hands of another author. Some of the oldest tales in literature – in particular The 1001 Nights  – have a similarly generic feel, as though the original authors were conscious of making narrative templates that might be taken up by writers of the future. The recursive or circular form is like a handing on of the baton. One of my favourite examples is the short story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ by the late Martin Amis. Right at the end, after Atta has steered the plane into the World Trade Centre, the story’s opening sentence is repeated: ‘On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.’ For all the praise heaped on Amis as a stylist, in this story he is quite restrained, as though sensing that too much flair will impede our willingness to imagine Atta’s last day played out again and again.

_______________

The Way to Work (Salt) is Sean Ashton’s latest novel. A sister article around its creation, entitled “A novel isn’t just a narrative, it’s an environment, a habitat that cultivates characters” appears in the 23 May edition of the Irish Times newspaper. The novel The Way to Work follows on Sampler (Valley Press, 2020), a selection of pieces from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets; Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque 2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed in the negative; and Sunsets (Alma Books 2007), a collection of reviews of imaginary artworks. Ashton has contributed poems, essays and stories to many other periodicals, including “Oxford Poetry”, “Poetry London”, “Poetry Ireland” and the philosophy journal “Collapse”. Ashton’s essay “ Performance art meets literary étrangeté” appeared in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 22 August 2022.  

Order The Way to Work (ISBN 9781784632922) in Britain from publisher Salt or from uk.bookshop.org, which specializes in distribution to independent booksellers. The Way to Work is also available from most international sites.

Woman invisibility: Ann-Eva Bergman, Glinda the Good Witch, ruby slippers, Gretchen’s Faust, Emmy Klinker and the fate of woman painters, etc., etc.

Marianne von Werefkin, Herbst (Schule), "Autumn (School)", 1907. Photo Courtesy Wikipedia

It’s Glinda, Good Witch of the West, who says the solution to a problem is as simple as closing your eyes and clicking together your personal pair of ruby slippers. I took Glynda at her word almost every day of my army career, hoping to wake up and out of it, safe and free, with soldiering an ugly, but fading, dream. It didn’t work.

The ruby slippers, Glinda’s estate lawyers say, are essential to the effectiveness of her hollow positivism... It won’t work for people in street shoes, let alone combat boots.

Glinda-style solutions come up because I’ve been thinking about why artistic retrospectives that feature woman as painter, such as the ongoing Anna-Eva Bergman exhibition at Paris’ Museum de l’Art Moderne (MAM-Paris), are so rare.

I say “’woman’ (singular) as painter” to imply that gender is an external force in a painter’s experience.

Emmy Klinker, "Landscape", 1918. Photo Courtesy Berlin 1918 - 1933

Closing my eyes – despite the harsh truth from Glinda’s estate mouthpieces, I still close my eyes when I scour my memory –  I remember only a 2014 Sonia Delaunay retrospective that included more than 400 (!) works, also at MAM-Paris. The show did a lot to show her paintings but nothing memorable in respect to her as painter.

I also remember that Delaunay featured in the 2015 Schirn art museum exhibition STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 (“Storm Women. Women avant-garde artists in Berlin 1910-1932”), curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer in, as it turns out, appropriately, Frankfurt-am-Main, the birthplace of Goethe and, thereby, of Gretchen.

The set up for STURM-Frauen returned the mostly fragmented oeuvre of its featured artists to their native scene, using as guides the notebooks and catalogs of the legendary gallerist, editor, promoter and painter Herwarth Walden, as well as the archives of the famous Sturm magazine.

I understand that most of the documentation was conserved by Nell Walden (1887–1975 - also featured in the exhibition). Luckily for us, Nell Walden had a Swedish passport, settled before the second big war in Switzerland, was able to weather her couple of husbands. When you look at it, she was also co- founder and -editor of the Sturm magazine and gallery. In addition to suggesting the name Herwarth Walden as a professional handle, Herwarth was her first husband.

It also seems that STURM-Frauen picked up on a 2012 exhibition called Sturm - Zentrum der Avantgarde (“Sturm - Center for the Avant-Garde”) in Wuppertal, Germany – by the way, home and performance space to Pina Bausch, the contemporary dance ur-choreographer. This exhibition, in turn, seems to have benefited from Germany’s late-post-war efforts to pick up the cultural pieces.

The STURM-Frauen exhibition bowled me over.

I was a man who suddenly discovers he has a long-hidden, parallel family of magical sisters, all of ‘em obvious blood plus spiritual relations.

I even met a previously unknown favorite sister among them, a certain Emmy Klinker (1891-1969). I noticed her because she painted people I have known along with a lot of my emotional color and landscape.

Klinker’s eye has Franz Marc color fluidness in it; her hand makes me think of Marc Chagall, but seems less emotionally contrived, more esthetically nuanced, than the great man’s stuff. She struck me as a pure painter in the same way as Emily Dickinson is pure poet: staying out of the way and to let me look.

The Herwarth-Nell Waldens represented European artists active in the Expressionist, Cubist, and Constructivist movements. Visual artists in the Sturm gallery stable included then- and now-renowned artists such as Kandinsky, Marc, Kokoschka, Klee and Chagall as well as the 30 woman artists presented in the STURM-Frauen exhibition.

In addition to Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter and color theorist Robert Delaunay, and the single and childless Emmy Klinker, the better known among these artists included Natalja Gontscharowa (1881–1962), Gabriele Münter(1877–1962) and Hilla von Rebay, ((1890-1967), respectively, wife of Mikhail Larionov, “founder” of Russian abstraction; first wife of Wassily Kandinsky; and  co-founder of the Guggenheim. 

Artists less- or un-known to me were Vjera Biller (1903–1940), Marcelle Cahn (1895– 1981), Marthe Donas (1885–1967), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Helene Grünhoff (1880−?), Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876– 1923), Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948), Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig (1888– 1965), Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924), Maria Uhden (1892–1918), and Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938).

Because I had been so moved by STURM-Frauen and the work I had discovered there, until recently I had been closing my eyes at least once a week and wishing the exhibition would show up here in Paris.

Yesterday, Monday, I was having a pint with a dear friend of mine, a man of wit and talent from Germany. I mentioned Anna-Eva Bergman and STURM-Frauen and all that. He said, “Really? Interesting. Bergman’s the wife of Hans Hartung, isn’t she?” Then he asked the server for more chips.

So, there it is.

As far as I know, STURM-Frauen has not traveled, been reproduced or been picked up on or otherwise copied anywhere. The catalog, STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein(ISBN : 9783868322774), is out of print. STURM-Frauen has tumbled, perhaps, into a ruck of positivist solo retrospectives of those woman painters with sufficient remaining oeuvre to highlight painting by women in the past.

I now reckon the void and failure of my STURM-Frauen wishes comes faute de ruby slippers – I have no power and money to make it otherwise.

In my wishing, I should have remembered that Gretchen, as earlier noted, born in Frankfurt with Goethe, is obviously the subject and hero of Faust.

But I was about as attentive to that fact when first I heard it as my friend was to me yesterday. It may even have been this friend who had made the remark .

Anyhow, it is just so difficult to pay attention to woman stuff when it comes to art, is it not?

Thinking about Glynda, Good Witch of the West and hollow positivist, Gretchen’s Faust, Anna-Eva Bergman as painter, Sonia Delaunay and her 400 works, the disappeared STURM-Frauen exhibition, me and my inattentive friend and the paintings of Emmy Klinker, has made me think that the dearth of woman painters is owing to woman “invisibility” more than anything else.

Invisibility is the tool of consciousness that enables groups and individuals to selectively blank out categories of real things, people, deeds, feelings and ideas, according as a given structure of consciousness requires.

Invisibility is the perceptual mechanics behind “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Cutting is its short form.

Invisibility does not interfere with the actual physics of reality. Say, building explosive spy drones.

The fate of Emmy Klinker and her works and days is a good example to help in understanding how woman invisibility works. It shows that there is a sort of rippling traffic light, a trinary flicker, that selects her out of consciousness even while leaving a “biography” of materialized traces of a life lived or just later projections by others.

Emmy Klinker’s creative and social lives were suggestive, novel- or Netflix-like, both showing real genius and fine character.

Klinker, they say, began painting at 16 – youthful interest apparently being a prime legitimating factor for woman painters. She was good enough to attract Kandinsky’s attention and became a part of that man’s famous Der Blaue Reitercircle. She was represented by Herwarth and Nell Walden, was particular friends with people such as fellow-creators Gabriele Munter, Der Blaue Reiter co-founder Franz Marc and the American “witness” to the period, Albert Bloch …

Apparently single, Klinker was also apparently wed to her creation. She was quite normally productive as we can deduce from her experience in Germany’s 1933-45 Bully-Boy Zeit. Klinker was culturally prominent, as well as a principled mensch.

The boys apparently saw enough of her to make Emmy Klinker a suitable whipping girl. She was named, along with her friend Franz Marc, already dead (killed in the First World War) and many others, including, just for instance Kokoschka and Matisse, a degenerate painter.

Klinker’s work Weiss Pferde (“White Horse”), for example, was original and popular enough to merit destruction to enthusiastic public contumely. Klinker’s cultural notoriety was such, I read someplace, as to merit a warning visit from indignant “Brown Tide” stalwarts.  

Because Klinker had courage enough to hide a Jewish friend at her house, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp for a three-month warning visit.

Although fairly soon after 1945 Klinker seems to have won prizes for her past work, it is unclear if she was producing and showing new work. Her work, from before 1936 or after, I can’t determine, but I think not, has featured in a few collective retrospectives in the past 20 years.

Why does painter Emmy Klinker touch me so? Because her self-portrait makes me think of Rimbaud reassuring his mother as to his respectability? No. It’s the woman invisibility that brushes out contexts and connections. For instance, I can think of no mention of Klinker in any Wikipedia entries for her painter friends and colleagues … All that is left of her is a lonely curriculum vitae, the CV isn’t the person who did that painting and the woman who did the painting is not my secret sister.

Worst of all, I’m as implicated in woman invisibility as anybody else. I’ve also cut people.

Invisibility is Glinda, Good Witch of the West: positivist solutions that really address a problem don’t really exist.

Invisibility is how Gretchen creates and shapes a book that even the author called Faust. Invisibility is my friend’s and my slip-slide attention to subjects that concern us.

And the STURM-Frauen painters?

A good, solid case study in how woman invisibility works. And that’s why STURM-Frauen, like woman painters generally, has slipped and slid down into an entry on its very fine curator’s CV.

Still, in the same way as the Waldens’ Sturm notes made the STURM-Frauen, the exhibitions’ 30 painters, can take you on a course in invisibility mechanics. No matter what the number of works on show and the esthetic and cultural merit, taken together, each “biography”, from Vjera Biller, euthanized, to Hilla von Rebay, philanthropist, to Marianne von Werefkin, stateless noble, to Maria Uhden, dead in childbirth, tells a story the mechanics of woman invisibility.  

The portraits, on the left, from top to bottom, are from the Schirn Museum's Sturm-Frauen and Flikr. From top to bottom, Emmy Klinker, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1918; Natalja Gontscharowa, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1908 © Tate, London, 2015 ; Lavinia Schulz, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"). Photo Courtesy Wikipedia; Maria Uhden, Frau mit Vogel "Woman with bird") 1917; Emmy Klinker, Bildnis einer jungen Frau (“Portrait of a young woman”) 1921; Marianne von Werefkin, "Self portrait". Photo: Google Art

 

Anna Eva Bergman: woman painter, woman’s painting, woman as painter [by Tracy Danison]

Anna-Eva Bergman  N°33 1947 ‘Ensomhet’ huset (gyllne snitt), “Solitude: the house (gold part)”

Gestern, hab’ich zu viel Weißwein getrunken…

It’s always so difficult to know where to begin. The sound of the phrase Gestern, hab’ich… makes me hear Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. It reminds me, too, of how very dissimilar things, like bosons and quarks or frogs and badgers or faces and dances, are mostly similar. Someplace, even, everything is joined at the hip.

Which puts me in mind of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris’ exhibition of painter Anna-Eva Bergman’s work, put together by curator Hélène Leroy and called Voyage vers l'intérieur.

Born in Stockholm in 1909, raised in Norway, trained in Austria, dead at Grasse, France, in 1987, Bergman was part of the so-called Ecole de Paris: the vast numbers of mostly Euro-Atlantic artists who worked in or from Paris from 1900 to 1960.

MAM-Paris describes Bergman as a key figure in post-War European painting. And Bergman surely does have the necessary immortal hand and eye of a top quality painter. But what struck me about Voyage is not the high quality of Bergman’s work or her place in the Euro-Atlantic esthetic pantheon, but its success in underlining Bergman’s development as painter.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°6-1960 "Pyramide"/Pyramid. Photo © Claire Dorn

I came away from Voyage thinking, believing, that Bergman’s development is not so much a matter of visual styles, visions or ideas, periods, as, for example, with Picasso, but a matter of how she sees what she sees.

Bergman’s hand and eye manage to find, refine and then to paint her perception of the material world. I experience her work as sharing her perception with her. Contrast this with my experience of Picasso’s oeuvre: admiring his ability to manipulate perception, to put Dora Marr in pieces and put her together otherwise, so to say.

Bergman’s key-figureship among the giants of the Ecole de Paris is owing first, I think, to her evident ability to identify the elements of her own perception and to identify the structure she gives those elements. Second, she has the hand and eye to material represent the elements in her structure in such a way that a spectator can experience her seeing and perceiving.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°26-1962 "Feu"/Fire. Photo © Claire Dorn

For me, in situ, the take on Bergman as painter begins with the MAM’s good selection and placement of the artist’s early work. In addition to her remarkable hand and eye, the selection strongly marks Bergman’s admirations in contemporary painting. It’s Bergman but I feel I see, say, Otto Dix in some clubbers in decadent volupté or Fernand Léger, say in a garishly-colored geometric flying machine. I look out toward the long part of the gallery and her admirations have given way to exploration of Anna-Eva Bergman consciousness as a painter: a house called N°33 1947 ‘Ensomhet’ huset (gyllne snitt), “Solitude: the house (the gilded part)”. In the moment, I am just struck by its originality of the intriguing geometries and colors and texturings that make me say to myself “Sure, it’s Anna-Eva’s house”.

Later, when I do my reverse visit, I’ll realize that ‘Ensomhet’ exemplifies the particular quality of her life’s work. For me as a spectator, from ‘Ensomhet’ on, Voyage vers l’intérieur is not a tour of the development and refinement of Bergman’s perceptual or painterly essence or of her psyche. As a painter, she shares her way of seeing; her work become a conversation piece for my reflection, as sharer, on experience and perception.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°13-1976 "Deux Nunataks". Photo © Fondation Hartung-Bergman

Just to pick some ongoing themes that experiencing her work enables: how am I able to share Bergman’s how? How can I experience what I always think of as un-shareable: What is an individual if it’s joined at the hip with all other individuals? If such exists, what is the spice and everything nice, the snips, snails and puppy-dog tails that make for a “shared/true perception”? Is that “true” somebody’s Yahweh & Jesus cult or a Kant & (William) Blake coffee klatch? Submission under Authority or Freedom under Reason? ...

Back to the exhibition. It was very refreshing to come out of the Voyage vers l’intérieur feeling as if I’d had some insight into Bergman painter. That’s a rare enough thing whoever the painter may be. But it’s really, really rare when it comes to woman painters.

I think that is so because the curator needs to gather so many exemplary (chronological and written) inputs around an essentially Beyond Words topic - no matter what, when it comes to saying what is there and how so, it's bound to be jagged and incomplete. So, hats off to MAM-Paris and its curatorial teams. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

I don’t know.

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

________

June Events 2023 Performances 30 May – 17 June

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

Prepare your June Events 2023 experience

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

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

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

live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zao Wou-Ki at MAM Paris: intriguing (painterly) commentary on modern art in Europe [By Tracy Danison]

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Encre 79, N°6, 1979. Photo: Charles Delepelaire/Parisienne de Photographie © Adago, Paris

A donation of nine Zao Wou-Ki paintings has recently been added to the Museé de l’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM Paris). The donation, by the poet’s widow, Françoise Marquet, brings the museum’s holding to eleven paintings, four India ink drawings, four prints and seven vases. The new (and the old works, too) are a treat as well as a useful addition to the museum’s fund of critically important work.

Born in Beijing in 1920, arriving in France in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki was in at the beginning China’s opening to the modern European takes on visual and plastic art. He attended China’s first arts faculty, the China Academy of Art between 1935 and 1941, studying there under Fang Ganmin, an early advocate for a fusion of China and European practices. The academy, founded in 1929, supervised by French-trained painter and educator Lin Fengmian, promoted the idea that, in a modern society, art could take the place of religion – a common enough idea in art circles in Europe at the time and not far from the surface today. The academy has survived all China’s political vicissitudes; it has operated under its original name since the 90s.

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Hommage à Henri Matisse II 21.5.93

Though there’s absolutely no visual resemblance that I know of, Zao Wou-Ki’s work always puts me in mind of the ideograms of the I Ching. These invite the onlooker to contemplate the natural forces represented in the light of a question. Zao’s work, especially his ink drawings, seem to emphasize the role of onlooker perception. Like the I Ching, Zao seems to call to pure perception, not to the self that is perceiving nor to the particular structures of what is perceived.

The emphasis on individual onlooker perception seems to me unique among the moderns with whom Zao associated, as well as those whose influence he claimed, including Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne.

In contrast to Zao, all three artists – and their contemporaries, too –  seem to be trying to impose some specific underlying form of the world perceived, whether that’s atomic lattices or color theory or some projected psychology or political message.

At least in the MAM’s newly fortified collection, Zao seems to go out of his way to underline his difference with his contemporaries without spelling out what that difference may be (which makes sense).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Citrons, 1949-1950. Photo ©Naomi Wenger

For instance, Zao’s Hommage à Henri Matisse II (already in the collection) invites me to wonder where, exactly, the old color maven is to be found in a rising pillar of black between rose and blue, mostly up and down brush strokes. My visual memory finds itself somewhere between Yves Klein and Rothko – no easy connection to Matisse. Is Zao trying to call attention to something implicit in Matisse’s famous color and figure or to his own approach to perception?

Also, a still life called Citrons (part of the recent donation) recalls the intense “real-reality” value of Cézanne’s take on these homely scenes. But Zao entirely dispenses with the older artist’s visual abundance and warmth of color. Citronsmakes me feel I’m reading Heidegger’s essay through the sole of Van Gogh’s Shoes – am I missing how manipulative Cézanne is?

None of the intention I’m lending Zao is out of the ball park. He had a broad of view of how visual art comes to be and plenty of the type of experience in living that tends to blunt the sense that you know what the world is about.  For his romantic companions, Zao chose the composer Lalan, the actress and later sculptor Chan May-Kan and the art historian and curator Françoise Marquet (who made the donation).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, A la mémoire de mon frère Wou-Wei ,15.12.22-11.02.79). Photo: Courtesy Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris

Zao claimed to be an acolyte to Paul Klee as art theorist as well as a painter. Among his many friends and acquaintance in his adopted country, he counted poets, writers, and even politicians, among many others, poet and painter Henri Michaux, novelist François Cheng (who, among many other endeavors, translated classics of French poetry into Chinese), the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who also spend a lot of time wondering what was what and why), the Résistance hero and high culture advocate, André Malraux, and l. M. Pei, another important figure in the China-Europe esthetic fusion and architect of, notably, the pyramid of the Louvre.

Have a good long look yourself if you’re in Paris. God knows, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to see Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. And then, there are also many more works by Zao at Musée Cernuschi, musée des Arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

Catch the Ballet de Lorraine in France this summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   … /

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

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

Everyman’s an angel!

/ …

                                                            - “Footnote to Howl” – Allen Ginsberg

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fits” is the operative word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La Pieuvre

Not too terribly long ago, for my getting-ready-for-bed tirade, I was telling my partner that dance performance creators don’t pay enough attention to the effect they make on spectators. “I’m telling you, Karine,” I muttered, “They waste their time on their same-old same-old stories and politics”. … I pull my tee-shirt over my head, slide down my pants, shake them off my ankles, sit heavily on the bed. “Worse,” I growl, “They aren’t attentive enough to the psycho-physics of movement, visuals, traditional stagecraft and choreography, how spectators are affected by all that stuff… Of ourse you’ll say ‘All physics is perception’, won’t you?” …

I angrily pull off my socks, see the 12-for-2.99 crackerjack fabric has left lumps of damp black lint, very much like dirt, between my toes. “Imagine!” I exclaim, “Some even think there’s a fixed performance ‘language’. As if contemporary dance performance is some sort of as-yet unexplored Kabuki continent”! Yanking the quilt over my head, using a harsh if muffled stage whisper, I continue, “When all is said and done, Baby, these self-regarding dance performance creators think pretty much like the morality police: getting naked means getting naked! Getting naked is shocking! Off with your heads!” I am going to erupt with a “Tinkers, the lot!” content myself with a “Bah” when I catch the lightly snoring Karine out of the corner of my eye… Having vocalized my discontents, I decide instead to follow her into the gentling arms of Morpheus.

 

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Maxime Le Blanc

The next day, Rebecca Journo’s Portrait (2023) performance piece hushed my tirading mouth.

She and her collaborators in her troupe Collectif La Pieuvre, at least, measure the effects of suddenness, sound, stillness and movement on spectators; what they measure they measure out with skill and judgment. They bring spectators along both with Journo’s narrative intention but also into the performance experience – we not only get her point, the experience of her piece gets us into new imaginative space.

The rapidity with which her combination of psychological noos, traditional stagecraft and visual choreography had me turning my mind toward the scary flimsiness of identity and the emptiness of image quite amazed me. There’s practically no run up to it. You sit down and, bang!, you’re in Portrait’s happening, experiencing through the contents of your own imagination.

Journo writes that Portrait is a study of “going from image to movement, emptying then filling the form,” like Cindy Sherman or the genius-and-young-suicide Francesca Woodman have done by creating “selfies” that point away from “self” to “portrait”, “image” or “pose”: Who’s there? Who are you? Who am I? Is there someone there?

• 
• 
• 

Journo shows what she means with a stage-occupying figure, drawn, it seems, from Modigliani’s 1918  Portrait of the artist’s wife – an intriguing image that expresses Modigliani’s affective perception and of which nothing remains of Jeanne Hébuterne, the wife in question. I’m assuming the link between Hébuterne and the portrait because Journo and her team use the portrait extensively in their promotion and because it hitches onto real stories into the performance line: in life, Hébuterne threw herself out of a window and died on 25 January 1920, the day after Modigliani’s death.  

However, the figure on the stage as figure is entirely sufficient as placed in the set and used in the scene is more than adequate to the performance. It occupies one of a row of three metal chairs slightly left of center. It, the chairs and the sound inhabit a maze of black, ceiling-to-floor sharp-angular-cut curtains and a right-front-stage “cabinet of visual commentary” which one sees is equipped with curiously heavy objects, including, for instance, a reverse magnifying glass. The stage is framed against white, contrast, light; scenarized lighting, with a yellowish, old-fashioned bulb tint is used for performers; acoustic space is filled by occasional sounds of what makes me think of creaking metal swings in a lonely playground and the irritating ruckus of scratchy-crashing electromechanical interference.

 

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La Pieuvre, Brasles

Performers suddenly appear and disappear in this unsettling maze of sharp straight angles, dark and light, creaks and scratchy squawk. They use a moonwalk-style that exaggerates and speeds up the top-front-back-bottom contrast and lends performers a certain slinky lizard-like visual that makes me think of Bram Stoker’s women vampires in his Dracula novel - the book attributes slithering to the count but my memory to his women. It seems to me then that the Portraitperformers, like Stoker’s women are pure pose, images of what isn’t seen or reproductions of what they believe others see; a vampire casts no shadow and has no reflection.

Who are Portrait’s performers/Dracula’s women? Stoker portrays his women as appetites – as reflexes. My thoughts on Journo’s cues can take things farther: people as performers as performances; in the end, they seem not much more than suitable simpers to show around. Identity not only depends on the purposes of a beholder, it may be nothing more than an echo of those purposes, an endless performance by an identity that is not more substantial than “performer”, an endless loop of selfies.

But it’s the connections not the intentions that are the genius in Rebecca Journo’s piece. Though she cannot, could not, know that I will frame Portrait with my memories of reading Dracula, she does know how to use her craft to push me in a particular emotional direction: recalling especially the emotions raised by chapter three of Stoker’s scary book: the frightening void behind the “revealing” image.

So, I come away from Journo’s Portrait as I came away from Dracula – deeply unsettled by all this identity stuff. Thinking, maybe the evil of Tik Tok’s “AI-enhanced” portraits is not so much imposing an unachievable identity on a fragile self as revealing there isn’t much more to that fragile self than an AI-enhanced selfie. And the “AI” is no such thing, to boot. It seems to me that realizing this is a lot more likely to send me jumping out of upper-story window than not having the price of a nose-job.

Rebecca Journo and her collaborators in the troupe Collectif La Pieuvre presented Portrait for the first time in Paris during the Faits d'Hiver 2023 program. On 9 February 2023, I saw it at Atelier de Paris/CDCN as staged and performed by Rebecca Journo herself,  Véronique Lemonnier, Vera Gorbatcheva and Lauren Lecrique, wearing costumes by Coline Ploquin, on  a set put together by Rebecca Journo and Guillemine Burin des Roziers, with sound by Mathieu Bonnafous and lighting and other effects by Jules Bourret.

Were it given to all to see into the heart of each! Pierre Pontvianne’s Motifs [By Tracy Danison]

Partner dance, the true illusion of being together. "Motifs" by Pierre Pontivianne. Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Motif usually means “intention or motive”. For Pierre Pontvianne, I think, the word carries the connotation as well of “recurring pattern” or maybe “recurring sense”.

However the title may play, the Motifs stage is a wide-open, squared-off, white floor – a short luminous yellow hyphen of a line along with an occasional crash of disembodied sound to divide it. Spectators are seated in folding chairs all around, at one level with the distanced action.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

When a Man-Woman Duo commence the Motifs action, that hyphen of a dividing line is separating them; the crashes punctuate and progress the phrases of their movement.

As Motifs progresses, spectators take on the progressive intensity of b-girls and b-boys at a battle of clans absorbed by the developing performance of good friends and serious rivals.

I could feel Karine, my partner and a “b-kid” herself – “b” for “ballroom” not “break” – becoming more and more absorbed as the man-woman duo transforms into a couple, into the image or archetype (?) “The Couple Dancing”.

She becomes more absorbed in what is happening, starts feelin’ good.

I begin thinking that if Tango or Waltz or Break or any other partner or social dancing were just expert performance of a dance,

Motifs’ pleasant 50 minutes would be just that, couples Breaking, Tangoing or Waltzing. Her absorption, spectator absorption, spectator appreciation would be easy to explain.

But the happening and the intensity of appreciation are not so simple to explain. Dancing couples are not just “couples dancing” holding each other and suggestively wiggling butts. Partner or social dance or Beyoncé dance, for that matter, are also part of the movement arts, just more partnered-oriented and social.

When it comes to movement art, I think, partner and social dance lovers, whether b-kids at battle or b-grammas like Karine absorbed by contemporary dance, know Dance from dance by body experience. Whether they’re dancing or watching others dancing, spectators are loving the experience of the coordinated concentration of body and mind and the delicious emotions – friendship and rivalry – involved in dance through their most intense personal experience of dance.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Spectators realize that success in social dancing – as is true, as I believe, for all dance – comes down to being there withan Other – being together.

This togetherness, though partial product of it, is quite beyond the holding and butt wiggling of physical performance.

So, I think, it’s the personal experience of being there with that guides the evidently deep spectator appreciation of Motifs.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Pontianne, his lines and crashes, the passage from duo to couple, gets it right from the beginning. Karine and the other absorbed spectators automatically understand the beyond-words sense Pontvianne’s trying to get across, especially, they understand the sense of the luminous yellow hyphen of a line on the floor."

The sense of line-hyphen, the happening of it in the choreography, especially, lets spectators experience the complex-and-true illusion that social and partner dancing involves: dance can make a couple of a duo as much as can be, dance puts us together as much as can ever be.

Dance, Pontvianne’s piece choreographs very poignantly, even partner dance, even social dance, even Beyoncé TV dance, answers the existential complaint of a classical Athenian drinking song I learned at school: “O! Were it given us to open up the heart of each and read the mind within”.

So. Your delighted eyes were right, Anne! Bien vu, Karine, Spectators. Bravo, Pierre Pontvianne. Let’s keep dancing!

Pierre Pontivianne created Motifs in 2014. I saw it performed by Paul Girard, Marthe Krummenacher, with sound by Benjamin Gibert, lighting by Valérie Colas and with stage visuals by Pierre Treille at Atelier de Paris for the Faits d’Hiver program, 27 janvier 2023.

(Wide) Open Space at Etoile du nord, insight and a lot of pleasure [By Tracy Danison]

Cie Suzanne – “To Life”. Light and space inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky. Photo © filipfoto_avoiretadanser

The more often I go to dance and performance events at the Etoile du nord, the more often I want to go to events at the Etoile du nord.

For one thing, the dance performance programs that include artist question times, such as the Open Space program, are always full with young people, which makes me hopeful for the future of live performance. For another, it’s informative and stimulating to see and hear about what artists think might or should be put forward and why and how it might work for spectators.

Performer choreographer Joachim Maudet’s effort to use ventriloquism in a new solo performance, called Kid#1, for instance, got me thinking about the real, physical and psychological effects of movement and stage tricks on people. The ventriloquism – relocation of sound from source – along with an underpinning narrative about schoolyard bullying, manages to evoke really strong anxiety in me (and also, apparently, in the 8- or 9-year-old kid in the seat next to me).

The ventriloquism charges the pathos of the narrative with a certain menace as well as strengthens visual dislocations: in costume (adult dressed as kid – psychic confusion?), in place (on the floor – a sidewalk?), in posture (sat-sprawl – drunk or deranged?) and in sound (in addition to portentous music, the ventriloquism disembodies a confused mumble bubbles above or behind the adult-kid-drunk – bipolar?). The effect of the voice dislocation on the scene is to point the spectator away from the narrative theme and strongly towards the character. The former is full of pathos – How awful! – but the latter is downright dangerous – Christ, I hope he’s not armed!  

On the whole, this year’s Open Space program, at least from a spectator’s point of view, was much more visual or experiential than narrative.

For instance, Group Suzanne’s WIP To Life uses six people walking together alone and in different relations inside the light of a movie (especially referencing Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 classic, Stalker) in an experiment with (notions of) space in performance. Julien Rossin’s S'enembra explores the use of light in close-in body movement…. Nana Movemen’s evolving Jamais la fin looks mostly to the effect of repetitive movement on spectator visual experience, using what I think of as a “techno-quadrille” to “show the encounter of a masculine and feminine duo, mix them up and finally forget [that the two genders] exist”.

 

Collectif La-Ville-En-Feu – “Les Planètes”. Using dance performance to shape urban space. Photo © Julie-Folly_Belluard-Bollwerk

My favorite experiential-oriented WIP was Collectif La Ville en Feu’s Les Planètes. The collective – made up of performer choreographers Marius Barthaux, Thomas Bleton, Agathe De Wispelaere, Juliet Doucet, Jean Hostache, Louise Buléon Kayser, Giulia Dussollier, Myriam Jarmache, Simon Peretti and Garance Silve – has long been working Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into the fabric of urban landscape.

Many of the collective’s members are or have been students of Nadia Vadori Gauthier, the choreographer, notably, of the well-known Une Minute de Danse Par Jour. Vadori Gauthier’s Une minute, created as it was in the wake of the Charlie-Hebdo terrorist murder-spree, affirms the right of people to animate and enjoy the city and its space. Rite of Springperformances are much in the same vein: a claim to enjoyment and pleasure in our public space. In contrast, the Les Planètes creation seems less to animate and enjoy space than to shape it, using performance as a tool to re-imagine it.

The collective's Open Space preview was a brisk and exciting taste of how the re-imagination might be done.

Without any warning, spectators are pushed outside and into a sort of exterior corridor between two fairly low-rise buildings. The ground space is crowded with shiny-leaf scritchy bushes, dry florist-style dirt and wood chips encroaching slabs of a concrete walkway, a notice board under a jiffy rain shelter. Above ground: a jumble of overhangs, metal struts and landings, catwalks, fixtures, chain-link accesses, intimations of roof-top equipment. It’s impossible to get a clear view.

The performers burst through up there, in the interstices. Spectators wriggle, stress and strain to see and hear as they jump and clamber, using the orchestral topography of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement suite with wordless chorus, as conceptual choreography and navigation.

They come slowly down. Spectators get out of their way. They conquer and carve out stages in the clutter and elbow-to-elbow bustle: fools and mad folk caper and roar, clump to make short, Planets-inspired drama and (a capella) sound and song. Fascinated, putty in their hands spectators try to follow them with our eyes, listen to what they can’t see… Just as they carve out stages from spectator space, they make them into stage hands and props.

Collectif la Ville en Feu’s ability to create and mold its performance space and master its spectators makes me think Les Planètes will be a different and wonderful experience of public art.