The Best American Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Phia Ménard: a magus sharing more than magic [By Tracy Danison]

“L'après-midi d'un foehn Version 1” by Phia Ménard - Cie Non Nova. Photo © Jean-Luc Beaujault

 

Little kids to the left of me, little kids to the right of me, little kids in front of me. In the unusual heat and humidity, Phia Ménard’s dressed in a heavy overcoat, wool cap and boots to my tee-shirt, cotton pants and practically new deck shoes. She’s fooling with a plastic sack. Not five minutes into her performance L'Après-midi d'un foehn Version 1, I am still as a mouse. Enchanted, just like the little kids.

Choreographer and performer Phia Ménard’s Après-midi Version 1 (the one made for kids – when I asked my friend Wang what the adult version was like, he took an ominous air and said, “Darker.”) was part of the Lafayette Anticipations’ annual Echelle Humaine dance performance program, billed in 2024 as a celebration of “artists and works at the frontiers of the imaginary and the real, of the tangible and intangible” … including, along with Phia Ménard’s and other performances, Delila Belaza’s Figures, testing out the possibility of a “universal rite” and Catol Teixeira’s La Peau entre les doigts (“The skin between the fingers”), dancing “an imaginary traditional dance sans origine ni territoirelinking the present to eternity”. I have to love it.  

It came to me that Phia Ménard, whom I’ve seen more than once before with pleasure, is a “faiseur” –  a “maker”. The French word has for me a connotation of magic without illusion, action that plucks an unnoticed reality out of ambient potential. So, ‘though there’s really nothing to choose between a magus and cheap jack magician, Phia Ménard is to me the former, not the latter.

In way of a doing successful performance, Ménard’s magus raised in me an un-remembered memory.

 

“L'après-midi d'un foehn Version 1” by Phia Ménard - Cie Non Nova. Photo © Jean-Luc Beaujault

 

I have come into the dusty square of a tiny town in the woods. Scrunched against a pile of kindling is rabbi Ber, a barrel of a hirsute man. He’s amusing a little jumble of scrawny brats. With each lazy snap of big man’s thick finger against the belly of his thumb, a grey dove flicks, surprised then frantically flapping, into the bright air.

The kids ignore the doves.

Instead, as they would a map, they study the rabbi’s face. They know it’s a squint of mind, not magic, that makes miracles, so they study his smirk and squint. They want to find their way from there to the peculiar regard that lets the good Ber see doves on a roost where they now see only empty air. They want only to snap their fingers for unseen things to come to be.

That’s why “faiseur” came to mind: Phia Ménard has just rabbi Ber’s peculiar regard. I am following it as, kneeling at the top of a circle of floor fans, she pulls a pair of scissors from inside her coat, and slowly, carefully, cuts a pattern of a dolly in a little plastic bag. She slips the scissors back in her coat, and taking the whole room in her regard, rises and walks slowly around behind the fans, turning them all on, seeming to exercise great care.

When the final fan is running, she sits back in her place and patiently watches the plastic bag take shape and live, first in the music – L’Aprés midi d’un foehn does reference Débussy’s breathy prelude involving a faun –  then with the vitalized air. It’s an old trick, but in her regard it’s all new. She grows a crowd, who, it seems, solo, couples, trios, a ballet, take their cues the ones from the others, twirling and diving…

And they tire. Some drop out, looking for the bar, perhaps, or seeking a tryst. Then more and more begin to go, fall to the ground. And when its just the right number, just as the true god would, Phia Ménard’s regard reaches out her hands to tear them to shreds.

We know it’s all not true and none of us, kids or adults, has suspended belief, been hypnotized or tricked. We’ve just joined her regard for a bit. And we like it.

Now everybody knows Phia Ménard’s secret.

Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées” [By Tracy Danison]

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Six pm on a crisp and sunny-enough Fall Saturday at Théâtre de l’Aquarium in the bois de Vincennes, drinks and snacks abounding. We’re seeing Fusées (“Rockets”) by Jeanne Candel.

The house is full, crowded even.

Fusées is inspired by a 1995 documentary by Andrei Ujică called Out of the Present, the story of Sergei Krivalev’s the events surrounding an unplanned and near fatal 300-day stay on the Mir space station in 1991-92. Candel strands two guys, Kyril and Boris, in a rocket ship.

Looking around, Karine remarks that there are some kids, but not so many as you’d expect for a thing about rockets.

She nudges me, Aren’t stories about rockets for kids?

I usually take it that a performance for spectators ranging from the age of reason to the age of despair – not just kids – will be at least coherent. The “from 6 years old” on the Fusées blurb had puzzled me. I tell Karine I double checked to make sure that it wasn’t part of a children’s program.

The blurb, the rockets kept me wondering, though. Are there so many theater performances figuring rocket ships for kids under six? Are there so few plays for people over six set in rocket ships? After all, performance, even the old hoary talky classic plays I was trained up with, tend to be topical. Doesn’t daily mention of rockets for each day of the nearly 70 years now that I’ve been too chicken my quietus to make make rockets eminently topical?

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Apparently, not.

A quick internet search shows that, no, there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a rocket ship and dealing with the realities and concerns likely appertaining to and generated by the typical environment thereof.

In the same way as Yorick’s skull is a conversation piece to the great quietus, rocket ships are launch pads for adventure and escape. Death happens in Elsinore castle and adventure and escape in Imagination; when it comes down to it, there are very few theatrical places in proportion to the places in which human experience happens; it strikes me that throne rooms are common-enough sets in contemporary theater performance and film.

That seems odd to me and as my psychoanalyst used to say, What’s odd is worth exploring. For instance, consider that, although the American Automobile Association estimates the average US person spends two hours a day, or 48 years of life, in their car – many of us even live, have lived or lived in a car – there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a car.

How does car space shape expression and why can’t Yorick’s skull figure on the dashboard? Anyhow, come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine a set that more perfectly represents the shape of contemporary life than a place where I’m constantly in danger of wheeling into very nearby sharp objects and somebody, likely a complete asshole or a deus ex machina, controls my air hose.

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Anyhow, getting avid spectators wondering about space, place and set, is only the first good thing Candel’s Fusées does.

It entertains you, rolls out classic-contemporary-performance-like, dramatic but non-traumatizing, invites rather than drags a spectator in to enjoy a mix of the old and new theatrical gesture and prop on a stage that is a rocket ship:

People moving a topless box piano and a big thing under a blue plastified tarp.

The big thing under the blue tarp reveals as a rather small, vaguely antique Punch & Judy-style puppet stage.

The four cast members, each bearing casts and bandages witness to the spurns and whips of danger and adventure [involved in riding rockets] and assisted in their stories by such plastic hand props as a commercially available Mister Sun, use the little (and now crowded) stage to explain the origins of the world. Matters touched upon include black hole theory and the Big Bang along with the longings of the wild beasts to get on up and out into the vast Nothing-something.

Segue to the rocket, riders oppressed by induced gravity before forced to sort of moonwalk, which one will be doing from now on in rocket ships because there’s zero gravity. O! What terrible lightness of being on a rocket ship!

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Cosmonaut Kyril is of course, nervous, taciturn to cosmonaut Boris’ cheerful, helpful.

Boris does the rocket’s whooshing and handles the passive-aggressive Q&A, ground control’s tergiversation and a competent and, therefore, sinister, AI, a self-modulating Whirr 45-89 Series, I believe. Boris of course beats the AI by tapping fast into a keyboard; the rocket ship gets moving.

They get someplace. As we all will.

Kyril disappears into a fold in space. Boris discovers a whole new universe. To paraphrase Ry Cooder, that’s just how things go on a rocket ship. Or so I’ve been invited to gaily imagine.

In addition to entertaining, with all this skill and noos, Candel manages to, as she says she intends to, “… Mime advanced technology, re-play the conquest of space with stage props and music… mak[e] an allegory of the indomitability of theatrical art, of its craft and of its space… The theater… in spite of difficulties, fragilities… even wobbling on a tightrope, is powerful stuff.

Fusées is theatrical performance at its best.

__________________

I saw “Fusées” at Théâtre de l’Aquarium, 14 September 2024 with Vladislav Galard, Sarah Le Picard, Jan Peters and Claudine Simon as cast. Théatre de l’Aquarium has been operated by the cie La vie brève and co-managed by Jeanne Candel, S. Achache, Marion Bois and Elaine Méric since July 2019. The theater has as thematic the entanglement of music and theater. Jeanne Candel also works with the Opéra Comique, Paris.

Out of the woods and into… a thicket of dance performance creation [By Tracy Danison]

œ-matiere, an immersive choreography by Pierre Pontvianne. Photo © cieparc

Summer’s over. Atelier de Paris just sent me a "Tour d’horizon” of its Fall 2024 dance performance offer: 100% new creation and pretty much a compendium of what’s up in contemporary dance and performance.

The wide play and density of the offer reminds me that the challenge of appreciating dance performance is accepting the premise(s). Accepting premises isn’t suspending disbelief and doesn’t involve so much mindfulness, a skill, as patience, a virtue.

Virtue is better than skill. While virtue holds the inner monkey at bay, skill just polishes the brute’s shines. Mindfulness is directive, acquisitive, good for business and war. Patience resists the impulse to make everything one’s own, assign it a cause, imagine its effects, tag it and put a price on it.

Part of the goodness in dance performance generally is certainly the opportunity it affords to practice virtue. Patience in dance-performance spectating, for instance, in addition to resisting the inner monkey, may often require raking up the courage to resist outer monkeys, too. Remember when the Wicked Witch of the West tosses a ball of fire at Scarecrow, cackling, “Want to play a little ball, Straw Man”? Scarecrow flinches, sure, but they hang on to the end of a tale that says so much more about American life than Scarecrow could have ever learned at school. Attaboy, Scarecrow!

As a fact, Atelier de Paris opens its creative rentrée with a street-lawn party combo that, as well as patience, fêtes community and commitment: the completion of choreographer Joanna Leighton’s Cycle des Veilleurs (“Cycle of Watchers”) #2 in the 12^th arrondissement. As with her other Veilleur events, for each of the 365 days in the year, a local-area resident has volunteered an hour to watch at sundown or sunset from an “object-shelter” (designed by architect Benjamin Tovo) and set up on a high point in the area. That’s it, Veilleurs just watch, not watch out nor watch for, nor watch out for, just watch.

She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, a choreography around a Lithuanian folktale by Lukas Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Leighton, who put together the notable People United (which premiered at Atelier de Paris in 2021) has a flair for identifying the essential in an idea and choreographing involvement with it. The Veilleurs party starts with a potential base of 730 fêtards walking in loose parade from Place du Cadran Solaire Papillon to the Atelier at the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes, where a picnic with post-prandial memory-share is planned.

It seems a good plan to jump from the Veilleurs to the new performances, which begin with a spot light on Lithuania. Lukas Karvelis’ solo piece She dreamt of being washed away to the coast recalls a popular folktale while Vilma Pitrinaitė’s When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, a performance around the repercussions of the Ukraine war in the post-colonial Baltic.

Myriam Gourfink does Rêche (“Raw”), a choreography for seven based on yoga breathing techniques. Pierre Pontvianne,about whose Motifs I’ve previously written here, presents Kernel-matières, an introduction to dance performance gesture and part of a seven-part piece called oe matière, meant as an immersive effort to “bring alive the stuff of performance outside the set in order to feel it and share it in a different light”. Motifs is part of the oe septet.

Rêche, choreography integrating yoga breathing techniques by Myriam Gourfink. Photo © Laurent Paillier

With Japan-born performer Yuri Itabashi soloing the title, Maxime Kurvers, who focuses on dance anthropology, has put together an un-NÔ NÔ play au feminin called Okina (“Old Man”). Taken by the same impulse to re-contextualize, Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains (“Distances”), feels out performance textured from observation of routine experience, in this case, New York and the high mountains of Switzerland and Japan.

Ruth Childs, choreographer-performer of Fantasia, an exceptional performance, returns to the Atelier with Fun Times,funnin’ out multiple layers of sense and experience in “fun”. Julie Gouju’s L’InesthétiqueManège (“Ugly Merry-go-round”), uses expressive dance not so much to flesh out meaning but give flesh to a specifically teenage emotion-feeling-reception model.

Current issues find their place, too. Tiran Willemse, Marine Colard, Ikram Benchrif and Paul Girard have come up with what you might call “docu-performance” pieces. Willemse’s blackmilk deconstructs gender, constructs queer and ponders the sadness in the black male heart. Benchrif & Girard’s Nichoir 93 multimedia performance asks How many charitable gestures make a home? And finally, Marine Colard, who wrote and performed Tir sacré, a successful send-off on sports commentary, takes a look at oratory as an art with Bataille Générale.

Report on “Song of Self” and “Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin” performance, Kyiv [By Tracy Danison]

Looking east across the summer theater stage, Syretsky Park, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024, 5:54 a.m. Photo © Tracy Danison

The morning of 15 August, the feast of the Assumption (of the mother to the father and son), at dawn, in the summer theater of Syretsky Park in Kyiv, Ukraine, I performed my Song of Self and Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin.

The video is on my YouTube channel @TracyDanison beginning 24 August but you can also find it now on Instagram or Facebook. The written version of the poems figures below. Thanks for sharing Song and the Exorcism. Thanks for doing a Song of Self yourself. As for an exorcism, I can think of more than one – How does Sting put it? – “priest, poet or politician” that might benefit from an exorcism, can’t you?

The video recording is only a memento to an act of Real Presence, an artefact of a moment or place created in space and time by my performance and recorded by an imperfect technology. 

In an effort to get as much self into the words as possible, I used rapidity and hoped for spontaneity, hoped to give a glimpse of my a-temporal, a-spatial, existence-making, entanglement with Other, ideas and things: I wrote the poems, printed them and put them in my pocket.

Many tropes and words from poets and writers and thinkers I love fell into place as I tried to put my intentions on paper, so I put them in, just like that. For Black Nail, the poem that initiates the (1975) movie Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller, summed up for me pretty well that truth is irony. I was then quite distressed to learn of it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

And, in those days, reading Germinal excited me so, I had to jump up and pace around every couple pages. I’ve realized since that nothing signifies something beyond words.

Oh, yeah.

Mirror field audio visual installation with television tower just behind. Babi Yar memorial site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

The evening I was writing Song of Self and Black Nail, the evening before I was to begin my train trip to Kyiv, my son, now partnered and a father himself, told me he’s been diagnosed with the same psychic disorder I had to put up with until recently.

He’s getting medicine for it, though.

And with that, I am consoled – thanks to time and the experience and the well-marinated thoughts and ideas contributed to me by Lina Wertmüller, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare, among others too numerous to thank.

He told me just last night that he was going through a whole day feeling well: “Dad, I think it’s working”, he said.

Reading what are essentially drafts from printouts, I performed Song and recited Black Nail once, without rehearsal or revisions.

In the evening after my performance, there was a drone and missile attack on Kyiv.

There is a very big and important television tower in among the woods not too far off where I was staying. I saw a drone or some drones get shot out of the air, as it seemed, just outside the window. Maybe that tower was the target; there was, I am told, a hard fight for it during the battle for Kyiv. From what I saw, I think the defenders used some sort of Gatling gun against the drone/s. The building trembled when it/they exploded.

I conclude from this experience that, given that I got the proportion of toad’s tongue to virgin’s first menstrual blood correct, my Exorcism does not take immediate effect. 

I picked Syretsky Park at random, pointing a green space on the map when I got to Kyiv. Madame Google indicated it was within walking distance of where I was. The evening before I walked to the park to check it was open in early morning. The next day, I arrived at the park just before the break of day.

The Black Nail inside Moloch’s brain: Contemporary colorized photograph of a killing trench lodged in a shard of granite near the child memorial at the Babi Yar site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

I noticed the summer theater where I performed when I walked through the park gate.

Before going there for my performance, I did not know that Syretsky Park was just across the street from the Babi Yar memorial or that the park was the site of a camp for various captives from 1942 until the end of German occupation or even that the place is part of the physical and moral topography of what we call “Babi Yar”.

I chose Kyiv for the Song of Self and Black Nail because the war against Ukraine has been made into a war against those who believe, as I do, that each person is a person, equal in fact to all other persons, no conditions, no exceptions.

The world begins where self begins, I believe.

It was coincidence that I found myself at the Babi Yar site. The television tower that might have been the target of the coming evening’s drone attack is located there. Off the paths, there are signs of deadly fracas and firing positions. 

The Babi Yar memorial is made up of reminders that the thousands murdered there were, in the locution of the poet and Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders, a human being, individuals, persons. Their voices whisper on the wind, rustle and sigh in the bushes and boughs of the trees. Literally. Never forget, never forgotten.

Stanczyk, court jester, broods on the victory of Moscow, by Jan Matejko (1838-93), Warsaw Museum of Art. Photo © Tracy Danison

As I was walking up through the park, avoiding a crowd of oblivious joggers and dog walkers, I had a vision. I don’t remember if I had read the description somewhere before or how the vision came to me.

It is of a guy standing over a little pile of not-quite-dead-enough human being and, with a submachine gun, shooting into the pile, an idiot spattering himself with flesh and bone, spreading superfluous terror and suffering. As he goes a-murdering from pile to pile, in his mind, this guy is obsessively scrolling “I am a German. I am a German. I am a German”.

This awful vision reminded me that Black Nail, murder-love, begins with how a person believes they exist.

These days, wherever you go, there is much encouragement for this sad guy’s belief that being part of some group or movement lets him exist. In some form or another, I’ll be trying to take Real Presence on the road and do some counter-encouraging, including in Ukraine, a lot of whose people are, thanks to the anguish of cultural discontinuity and war and the efforts of Putin and his allies to conjure Black Nail, teetering on the edge of “ethno-national” hysteria.

By the way. “Firstest with the mostest” and fastest to the rightest place, Ukraine is set to win, and soon, the war that the neither the Germans, nor Swedes, nor Turks could do, confining Russia to the north and bringing down its empire for keeps. Russia’s defeat will almost certainly generate Babi-Yar-shaped moral and practical consequences. Dread them.

________________________________

Song of Self

Waking as like from a fretful dream,

Here I am!

There are You!

Here I am!

I celebrate myself.

Still air, wind, cool, heat, light, dark.

I celebrate a blade of grass, the head of a dandelion

I celebrate a sharp green blade of grass,

I mourn the frowsy fragile head of a dandelion

Up down this that, heart side, mind side, before, behind, yonder

And soon. Past and Present. Future Perfect.

And what I assume, You assume too.
For every atom belonging to Me, the same belongs to You.

And not quite.

Mud shapes according to its water.

In light dust may beguile different. Yet.

Be, the finale of me,

You, the disciple of me!

Me, the disciple of you!

We, the apostle of You.

Smile or Spit. Up to you.

We want is finale of seem

We be Imperators of ice cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

Girls that dawdle in such dress.

Boys that whip, those muscular ones.

And who remains take that bedsheet

And spread it so as to cover the mouth that is dumb.

I celebrate Me.

There. There is there.

That is. There.

A swell in a wave and a speck in the dust.

Plus B + I + [ ~≠U/speck and wave]   

Makes here, where I and You are.

Thus, plus I + [ ~≠U], a place, a door.

Before the door we are there.

Gone through the door, we are here after.

To maintain attitudes, hold your position
To die bravely on yonder hill

And much should blind you,
Much must evade you.

All. At the cost of a bedsheet

And You left behind.

Breathe in. Breathe out

What a song to sing!

Birds and flight. Fish and swim,

Look and sky.

See and horizon.

A fine song!

Sing this song and never go home

Sing this song and everywhere is home

Sing this song and there’s no home

Take note before we sing

We cannot know where we’ll go

Only that I will wind up here with You.

Celebrate me.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

 

Black nail

You. Minds of my generation.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Russia. Listen. Vladimir. Listen.

Banqueted on sweet, sticky lies

Raise your eyes. Fine omens. Firefly signs.

Crackling Portents.

Curlicues of alchemical anatomy Nobody understands.

And Nobody was the fiction of a blind man. Now dead.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Your bright eyes fixed everywhere but on the Other

You knot stories babbled by babies in blindfolds

Truth is plain to see but too hard to say.

So say something, anything.

Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Saint Nick! A young man!

Lord, Christ Christmas, Beejesus! A young man!

Say it again! Say it again! And again.

To win is to succeed.

And to lose?

An inspiring late night movie

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man! Listen.

Vladimir.  Listen Russia.

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

When will we end the human war?

 

Listen! You have it all!

The power of the kingdoms. Like Binyamin says.

The murder, the pain, the stink of the dead.

All the bewildered motherless bitches with the thousand yard stare.

Fast-firing cannons, rocket bombs

And jellied gasoline and rattling guns

Tiny drones like dragonflies hurling potato mashers.

Thrilling. Exciting. Powerful. Emotional

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

 

But. To succeed is not to win.

You have to win to win. Listen. Russia.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

I still haven’t told you what you must to win winning.

I’m addressing you.

Those who believe.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

To win, you’ve got to love it.

The Murder, the pain, the horror, I mean

The Moloch stink in Vlad’s nostril.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

Fill your libraries full of tears.

Look at yourself through the grave

You’ve got to love the stink, I mean.

Santa Claus is Jesus as an old fella!

 

Those who want to believe. Listen

Russia. Those who want to take off your clothes.

Listen. There is a narrow sliver of steel, a black nail

Just here, at heart’s gate.

 

Embossed along the barbed rim:

“who love murder in their heart

Die.”

Russia when will you be an angel?

Vladimir wants to touch it,

Press on it a bit

As if you really were a prisoner

And it were only your limp prick.

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as young man

Kris Kringle is Beejesus as an older guy

Christ Christmas is Saint Nick in drag

Thursday falls next Tuesday

Russia. How can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

 

Russia, Vladimir is quite serious.

This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

Russia is this correct? Are you naked?

Is your prick limp ?

Quick. Reach out. Take my hand

Or die.

 

You have been told.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

Real Presence in Kyiv 15 August 2024: for Equality, Freedom, Solidarity [By Tracy Danison]

Lounging, big as a hog, heavier than sin, and with the fatal primus stove, the cat called “Behemoth” from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” on the porch of the house in old-town Kyiv where the author is said to have worked on it between 1928 and his death in 1940. Photo © Paul Tracy Danison

The negative reaction of certain friends – certain others have been supportive or neutral or just silent – to my upcoming performance-recitation Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August (The Best American Poetry, 26 April, 2024), as well as hurting my feelings, has rather surprised me. Crazy, dangerous, pointless, they’ve said. One was so angry, he refused to speak to me for several weeks.

The emoting, worried reasoning and confrontation is all very nice – I reckon it shows I’m loved or at least company good enough not to lose for a whim – but doing my theory of “Real Presence – or “Being With”, as I say for dance – is really important for making the world I live in, and, especially, for making the world I want to live in.

Here’s my apology to friends for doing what I want to do. You can use it as a model next time you need to, as we say, step out for fags.  

First off, physical danger. Kyiv isn’t Sarajevo 1992-96.

Even if the Russian Federation has a lot of the crazy-weird Republika Srpska about it and President Vladimir Putin has a lot of Srpska’s psycho-killer Radovan Karadzic in him, the ex-KGB counterintelligence colonel and romantic éminence grise in his own action-hero comic book and would-be Reichs Kanzler sans bottes ni moustache is not Srpska’s Columbia-educated psychiatrist-cum-Prime Minister trying out a half-baked archetype theory on live subjects. He can’t get close enough to knock it down with artillery, which is cheap.

Thanks to the expense of missiles, Kyiv 2024 nightmare scenario has more fever-dream dread than actual rocket bomb in the ambiance. Living it is more like living the inside of Winston Smith’s head after he’s been well worked over than anything else. Kyiv 2024 is awful in its own, special way because so much of it is fear and fear is so personal.

Come to think of it, the people of Kyiv, and of Ukraine, are being forced to cosplay the paranoid goop inside the heads of the likes of Putin, Karadzic, Alex Jones, Q or a 17-year-old whose Dad has bought him an AR-15. It’s the apocalypse: Welcome to the new age. Not so much deadly as scary.

As for pointlessly acting out my Real Presence/Being With theories in a scary place.

Well, off-hand, the idea of the performance seems to cheer up the people on the spot. That’s a lot of what I am wanting to do and most of what I can do.

Cheering up works for the neighbors, works for friends, why not people in Ukraine? As far as the country’s material needs and my competences and resources match up, I’ve got little to give. I’m no sharp-shooter, I can’t give the country an annual budget or guns or bombs, or do political action much beyond voting hard.

Moral support isn’t much, but it is mostly what I am, we are limited to here-below. Why not go for it when I can? And go for it with gusto?

Anyhow, doing little things – the things comfortable and rational middle-aged men and women friends call crazy, dangerous and pointless – does count on the cosmological significance scale; the silly old proverb about wanting a nail is actually up-to-date quantum mechanics. For want of my nutty, risky, senseless action, the world I imagine may or not n/ever be.

The minimal sense of agency in the little-things insight keeps me breathing; it kept Emerson from despairing; Whitman built an ontology on it and Thoreau, a way to live and a politics.

Because I have agency because I’m here is why I am calling my performance-recitation “Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August” Real Presence.

Real Presence will be in three parts – “Song of Self”, “Black Nail” and “Exorcism”. I’ll publish the version of it that comes on the day and post the video on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The three-part organization of the piece reflects my belief that the initial consciousness of somewhere with somebody at sometime empowers the construct “Self”, I, and, thus, “Other”, You, and, in doing that, realizes “Belonging”, We, Ourselves.

Politically, this belief imagines out as a (non “Marxist”) society and culture based on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity” over a society based on Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. That is, a personal, social and culture construct with moral equality of all persons rather than one based on legal, but not moral, equality of morally free citizens.

I think it’s the place of equality in the old slogan-syllogism of enlightenment politics that we’re fighting over today. Winning the war for the people of Ukraine – and it’s a political, not a military question – is the sharp end of the fight for existential, real equality.  

In my theory of art, Real Presence translates as striving to generate a state of “Being With”, conjuring the Imagination, the point where narrative begins or, rather, the un-narrative space where other scenarios may come to be.

I’ll be giving a seminar on Being With and, especially, on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity: Experience, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman” following my performance of Real Presence. I’ll also be interviewing a woman fighter and an LGBTQ+ -oriented fighter on their experience of national conflict.

Finally, nodding to a photo of Vladimir Putin warmly squeezing the claw of a murderer on a recent front page of the Badische Zeitung, I invite each reader’s real presence, wherever that may be, between dawn and noon local time this coming Thursday, 15 August.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a cellar in Kyiv: Theophrastus rules [By Tracy Danison]

A residential bomb shelter in a tower block island development somewhere in Kyiv, Ukraine, 10 July 2024 - Just so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind, the blast that killed 27 sick childred was from a missile. A walk  around ground zero and the neighborhood shows that in the way glass and a sprinkling of other random stuff are so neatly shattered over the streets: it’s the result of a calculated, industrially-tuned blast wave. 

And it’s impossible to doubt it was a deliberate hit. When all is said and done, the Russians have done a bang up job of wrecking the country’s electricity production - lots of good targeting in those many many attempts to get their bombs through. Also, this particular mass killing follows many other hits on civilian targets that defy any explanation but the intent to murder people at work, people at play, people just being people.

If we consider that Russia’s

Ship of State is commanded by a bully - a human type or character (I don’t recall if Theophrastus has one or not and can’t check because I am currently in an air raid) - rather than a rational actor - a psychosocial profile - a mass murder of children makes more sense. 

Unlike a rational actor, a bully has no goal; they are a type of human, basically, a psychic windmill, set to “win”. 

“Win” for a windmill just means “churning”. 

Donald Trump is a good example of how this churning works and why a bully is often misunderstood by rational actors. 

Trump’s famous “unpredictability” or “opportunism” or “transactionalism” is just a way to keep himself churning. His “achievements” are entirely incidental - he sees no contradiction in overturning Roe vs Wade and denying responsibility for wrecking abortion rights, for instance, while the achievements cited by supporters are largely in their own minds. 

Trump supporters and opponents, brought up in a society that worships winning, just assume Trump means “winning” as they do: dominating or mastering a situation and achieving desired and gratifying result. But Trump doesn’t. He’s just keeping on keeping on. 

Similarly, murdering some sick children is just Putin’s windmill churning. It signals or it should signal, to NATO bigwigs that the bully has churned into its default position: he doesn’t give a shit about what they think or feel or how powerful they are. 

From the get go, a bully effectually thrusts all the responsibility for what happens next on those who share space with them. These, mostly ordinary people, either by dint of their bureaucratic position or personal disposition, are all rational actors.

They are asking themselves, If he (Putin) does not care, what can we do (to make him care)? 

Those who have had particularly rebellious teenage children or experience with sexual or other types of harassers know what I mean. With a bully, the bullied or harassed always hold the responsibility bag. 

Responsibly, Putin’s opponents, like a flustered E. Jean Caroll wondering what to do when and after Trump humped her behind the clothes rack in a public place, always fall into prudently searching for responsible responses to a flagrant lack of personal responsibility. Trump zips up his fly and walks away; Putin hugs that Mohendra Mohdi guy in Red Square. 

But there’s no use trying to bring a bully to reason. Searching for responses makes the rational actor waste their time trying to get in the bully’s churning head. And since the others are responding, the bully has the sense of winning. 

How, frustrating, depressing to think, hiding down here in this catch-as-catch-can shelter, that this Putin asshole doesn’t care if he kills me and my friends or not - even as a mere edifying act of terror. E. Jean Caroll, I salute your years of tenacious patience and forbearance. 

So what to do with a bully if not respond? 

First off, it’s impossible to make a person care and, in respect to a bully, even more impossible since not giving a shit is keeping their little windmill a-churning. Then, and this important, Putin’s actions, like Trump’s, like any bully’s, are not connected with any particular goal or objective. He’ll lob a nuke or eat his dinner, as pleases. It has everything to do with him and nothing to do with you. And, finally, he just don’t care.

Down here in this basement hiding from him, it seems to me the only way to deal with Putin is to stop the churn of his windmill, give him a Putin equivalent of Trump’s 83-million/dollar judgment, which has effectively stopped the churn in E. Jean Caroll’s vicinity.

As a practical matter, I think that’s coming with the F-16s, which, with drones and good artillery, will pretty much stop Putin’s missiles, bombs and drones from coming into Ukraine. In addition, it will effectively end Russian sovereignty in a large swathe of Russia, a fact not likely to go down well with Russian patriots and plotters and which will thus keep him occupied elsewhere, among friends and familiars.

Russia strikes hospital: acceptance and lucidity

Kyiv, 8 July 2024. As we hurried across the “fruit tree park” toward shelter, my hostess remarks that Ukraine fired 30 rockets at Russia in the wake of the 40 fired by Russia earlier in the day. They were targeting a power station and a specialist hospital, the one with the aim of making people uncomfortable, the other with terrorizing and demoralizing in mind. Note that I call my hostess “hostess” because using her name might result in her murder. 

 

But  I realize suddenly that accepting the possibility that what is happening as tit for tat is to accept a premise that justifies the strikes - there’s cause and effect, which transforms Putin and company into rational actors.
But what rational actor would target a power plant to make people uncomfortable and a hospital for paralyzed children to terrorize and demoralize them?
Accepting the status of rational actor suggests that somewhere there’s a rational solution to all this murder. And there isn’t.

The people who are doing this are bullies, not rational actors. A rational actor has a goal and something to give in return. A bully accepts only a self-imposed minimal acceptable level of shittiness. The only way to stop a bully, as the non bullies all know from experience, is to make them stop.

Accepting Russia as a rational actor when it is a bully has all sorts of consequences for lucid thinking about this war. For one thing, it implies that this war is a ‘conflict’, where two “opposing sides” are trying to get something both want. This word obscures the fact that all the Ukraine side wants is to be left alone.
So, if it’s not strictly speaking a conflict and the only way to stop a bully is to make them stop, shouldn’t our effort be making them stop, not helping the Ukrainians to defend themselves in view of negotiations? There’s a difference. And thinking it over, the risks of nuclear war are probably less if we try stopping them.

Finally, accepting this war as a conflict between rational actors makes it easier to accept the consequences, not just the murder of paralyzed children but everything that comes with that - my hostess’ friend, an energetic 30 something with a son and a brother serving in the army since 2014, feels helpless and has a cynical view of humanity, it’s ability to do good and make the world better. She thinks this, although she spent the day on an emergency team taking care of the dead and wounded and organizing psychological help for survivors; she and friends have organized so that nobody’s kid is ever left alone. We are talking together in a Soviet era, “fruit tree” park: a gorgeously painted gazebo and small buildings in late art deco Bolshevik style. We are lopping, with hundreds of others, on sit-things ranging from benches to chairs to bean bags - all free and open to all comers… so maybe it might not be good idea for her to be believing things about her own life that are so removed from real experience (when we take war and mass murder from the equation of course) … We leave when the air raid sirens go off, it’s a hoof to the shelters…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put Behind The Line on your bucket list.

______

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

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

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

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

_________________

“Echo”, dance performance by Simon Feltz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and ends with its “I got life”:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Performance thumbnails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballet de Lorraine performers

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

Static Shot

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

Malón

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

Click for Ballet de Lorraine in Europe, Summer 2024

Ballet de Lorraine Third Program: Ayelen Parolin’s "Malón" and Maud Le Pladec’s "Static Shot" in perspective [By Tracy Danison]

“Malón”, dance performance by Ayelen Parolin. Photo © Ballet de Lorraine

As part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s third program for the 2023-24 season, I’ll be seeing Ayelen Parolin’s newly-created Malón (“Chaos Agents”) in premiere and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot for the second time at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy.

Natural turnover and state policy, and also the quantum wash that is making us a new culture era, as everywhere else, are welling up inside and outside the Ballet de Lorraine, so it’s a good idea to try to grind up some socio-esthetic lenses before I sit down to watch.

Parolin, who came to Belgium from Argentina in 2000, has been very creative, in view and quite successful in France these past couple years. The last Parolin dance performance I reviewed – but not the only one I’ve had the pleasure to experience – was WEG, in September 2021, at Atelier de Paris, when things were opening up again from the pandemic.

“WEG”, I wrote then, “Choreographs observation, imitation, vibration, variation and novelty, letting onlookers revel in the complex subjectivity of human relationships”.

Apparently, at some point in her life, Parolin took on “she” after having previously been identified or identifying as “he”. According to my friend, Wang, who nearly had a crise de nerfs when I told him I hadn’t realized any of this or its possible implications, says that the switch plays a role in how her work is conceived and perceived and how she is received. So, I’ll be going into Malón with the choreography of  identity and the complex subjectivity of human behavior as my lenses.

I’ll also be seeing Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot through two lenses. My first focuses on the social-organizational implications of Le Pladec’s appointment and her role as a state culture actor. She is currently director of Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) - Orléans, but will become director of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, starting January 2025. Who succeeds her in her old post and the direction she sets in her new one will send signals, make waves. She’ll be, at least for a while, not just one of the three women running one of the 19 CCNs, she’ll be the only woman running one of the five big regional dance companies, which include Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin, Ballet de Marseille, Ballet Preljocaj and Malandain Ballet Biarritz, two of which bear the name of their founders and current directors.

“Static Shot”, dance performance by Maud Le Pladec. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The centrally-funded but locally operated CCN are part of the Mitterand-era effort to institutionalize nouvelle danse française initiatives such as Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain (BTC), founded by Françoise Ardet, Philppe Thiry and Jean-Albert Cartier post-1968. Grossly drawn, each CCN today represents a mix of a more or less strong choreographic personality through its director (see above) and more or less local or regional culture- artistic action by its location-and dance culture tradition.

Along with a particular attachment to music, Maud Le Pladec claims BTC heritage, which promulgates a dance practice that not only eschews classic ballet but also ballets russes avant-garde style stuff. In addition to the clearly contemporary Static Shot, one of Le Pladec’s recent, and quite successful, productions, for instance, is Silent Legacy,  built out of Krump-style break dance featuring, besides a man and woman cross-genre performers, a 10- or 11-year-old Québec girl who can stomp and emote with the best in Compton. Le Pladec’s note says that the performance is a meld of break and contemporary dance and part of her ongoing investigation of dance genre and heritage. So, if at least some of Ayelen Parolin’s artistic identity may be said to turn on gender, going forward, at least some of Le Pladec’s innovation may turn on issues of genre J.

The most important lens for appreciating dance performance is spectator experience – truth is beauty, beauty, truth, 1066 and all that – does the technique, flow and sensibility bring the spectator beyond words, toward Imagination?

Largely, Le Pladec’s work does for me, as Static Shot did the first time. I noted that “Le Pladec seems to use music as the captain of one of those treasure-hunt ships uses a deck hose to wash the mud and barnacles off a long-hidden treasure, dazzling while incentivizing the crew. Instead of gold and jewels, she focuses the senses on the fantastic movement of these Ballet de Lorraine bodies” … Her approach, I thought then, goes to the shape and form of her consciousness, dovetailing neatly in this with Loïc Touzé’s quite choreographically different No Oco, with which Static Shot shared the bill.

Later on, after the show, I felt confirmed in the conviction that her piece had let spectatators stand for a moment on the balcony of her consciousness, run a finger along the woodwork, when I read this unexpected (prose) poem in her dance note:

Enfant, je danse sur les musiques pop de la disco-mobile de mon père, je suis peinte en tutu rose sur la portière de sa camionnette, je cours de galas en compétitions de moto-cross. Mon père aime la danseuse qu’il a fait peindre sur sa camionnette et j’aime que mon père l’aime. Je ne deviendrai jamais la danseuse en tutu rose peinte sur le C35 et pourtant, c’est bien grâce à elle que je danse tel que je danse aujourd’hui. 

(“As a girl I danced to the pop music playing from my Dad’s Citroën 35 van. I was the dancer in the pink tutu he had painted on the disco-van door and was dancing with him as he went from moto-cross race to moto-cross gala. Dad loved the dancer on the door and I love that Dad loved her. I have not become that dancer. But I owe it to her that I dance as I dance today”.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

A Call for real presence: Exorcise Putin's Black Nail, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 [By Tracy Danison]

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his friends and followers have conjured the Black Nail – the murder idol. Joy in murder. They mean to spread it. 

Without your real presence, without exorcism, the murder idol will take root, in Russia, around the world.

That’s why I will be present in Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon.

Painters, performers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, dancers, bystanders and witnesses, those whose can only sit by and watch – it is time to move, dance, to be there with each other for our friends at war, for our shared vision of a better world, to exorcise the Black Nail.

Wherever you may be between dawn and noon on 15 August 2024, be with me, be with the spirit of poet Alan Ginsberg, who did this first, when it was needed in America. And, as Ginsberg was, be with the tradition of Walt Whitman, who sang liberty and served it, too. Be with the spirit of Isadora Duncan, who re-membered the sacred nature of dance and gifted it to the modern world. 

Putin's gang is not the first to conjure the Black Nail, but Putin is the first in my lifetime to have the power, means and will to drive it hard and deep into human hearts. 

The Black Nail goes beyond the joy of murder and the worship of its idol. Once in the heart, the Black Nail attacks what Dostoyevsky calls “Normal Life”, those things that make life easy and sweet in spite of everything, those things that prevent a war of all against all: fellow feeling, culture, reason, the ordinary integrity of mind, body and soul.

Putin needs the Black Nail now because fortune is turning against him. His fellow travelers, his agents provocateurs and his armies are failing. Normal Life puts a check on him because it puts a check on all grand schemes, evolutions and revolutions. But, especially, Normal Life checks those dreams, such as poor Raskolnikov’s – such as Russia's Bolsheviks' –that call men and women to cruelty, murder and mayhem for justice' sake. Mikhail Gorbatchev invoked Normal Life for Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.  

Driving the Black Nail into human hearts is Putin’s last, best chance for success.

He and his confederates invoked it in the aftermath of the 22 March 2024 Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow.

Just a day after the murders, Russia state television featured a short, seemingly banal, play: four accused paraded before the stern and pitiless judge – from time immemorial, a trope favored by authorities in Russia and elsewhere.

But on closer inspection, it wasn't just ordinary authoritarian messaging. It was invoking the murder idol, tickling at murder joy, conjuring the Black Nail.

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

One of the accused, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, had the right side of his head bandaged, disguising an [a missing] ear. A second, Muhammadsobir Faizov, plopped half-naked in a wheelchair, missed an eye. Two other battered accused, faces swollen and bruised, shambled along with One-Eye and One-Ear.

Even as the sad parade staggered up to the pitiless judge, media were reporting that interrogators had cut off accused Rachabalizoda’s ear and forced him to eat it; accused Faizov’s interrogators had gouged his eye out.

The two battered accused were props, legends that said: With us, not just pitiless judges but bottomless cruelty, too.

Videos of the mutilations and beatings were and are available on the Russia internet as well, doubtless, as elsewhere.

Directed and deliberate, theatrical, naïvely comic, medieval, the conjuration cries: “Look at the cannibal who eats his own ear! Look at Cyclops the cripple! Look! Those sacks-of-shit black-asses can’t even walk straight!”.

Releasing the mutilation videos has no less a part in the dark spectacle.

Once conjured, the Black Nail, like Cupid’s arrow, must get purchase in the heart in order to prosper. Sadism and voyeurism are to the Black Nail what seduction and sex are to love: growth media. Pierced by the Black Nail, the heart longs for dark satisfactions: “Get that scum! Slap it up! Gouge it out! Rip it off! Make it eat it!”.

If you can, be there with me in Kyiv on 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon. Be on your own responsibility for what you believe and be with me to exorcise the Black Nail with real presence. 

______

“Okolotok”, meaning "self-sufficient village" in Ukrainian, is a village run by children in a well-known folk tale, explains Kharkiv-based photographer and creator Yevheniia Laptii. The Mad King is the wild child of the tale. He dreams of seizing total power and a princess living in the shadows along with it. ’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality” photo montage of a children's dramatization of the tale represents Laptii's realization that the tale is both sweet dream and nightmare after a soldier from Russia's occupation force told her “All will be well. If you join us”.

Yevheniia Laptii’s work featured in the 2024 edition of “Circulations”, an annual Europe-wide exhibition of emerging photographers at Centquatre Paris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he says, with emphasis.

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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