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Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent

On being human: dancer, choreographer Xavier Lot talks about Alice Davazoglou’s “Danser ensemble” [By Tracy Danison]

1. Alice 2_Danser ensemble  © L’échangeur-CDCN - copie
“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN


Carreau du Temple has some of the best dance performance programming in Paris. Its annual Festival Everybody, from 14- 18 February in 2025, is dedicated to the proposition that every body – every shape of individual, they mean – has a place in the sun. A "woke" festival if ever there were.

Since just after the end of the pandemic, the festival has managed to offer a little something for every penchant while exploring, through dance, performance, plain fun and information, the multiple senses of “difference” – Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference.

The festival offers fitness and dance workshops, intelligent discourse and masques à la Christopher Marlowe (that are now called “voguing balls”), but I mostly stick to live performance. This year I’m seeing Pour Sortir au Jour by Olivier Dubois, around his personal experience of the dancing body; Figuring Age by Boglarka Börcsok and Andreas Bolm, around body memory and remembrance; Chemical Joy by Lenio Kaklea, around consumption as pleasure; and Danser Ensemble, a dance performance by Alice Davazoglou, a performer and, now, choreographer, with Down syndrome.

I am familiar with Dubois’ work and Börcsok, Bolm and Kaklea will be new to me. Alice Davazoglou, though, was the featured performer in Mickaël Phelippeau’s De Françoise à Alice at the first annual Festival. I covered the piece in About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability. She returns to the festival as a choreographer for Danser Ensemble.

In a telephone conversation earlier this week, I asked Xavier Lot, a member of the piece’s all-star cast, himself a 40-year veteran of modern and contemporary dance and performance, about Davazoglou’s transformation from performer to choreographer.

I thought I heard swallowed indignation – a muttered “What a question!” – before he answers that, basically, people are not test monkeys in some Superman’s laboratory of capitalism.

“Everybody has a right to try”, he tells me, “Everybody has a right to err”.  And, he continues, trial and error are not about discovering some “unrealized talent” or uncovering some “hidden performance potential” or even “doing your best”.

 

2. Danser ensemble - Alice Davazoglou © L’échangeur-CDCN 4 - copie
“Danser ensemble” by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN


In the big picture, Davazoglou’s role as choreographer is about the freedom to be a human being, Down syndrome or whatever or not.

Lot has a long association with Art21, an arts development group for Down people – Davazoglou contacted him through the group about trying out for Danser Ensemble.

In then accepting to join, he remarks, his biggest worry was that he or other cast members might steal Alice Davazoglou’s show. The Danser Ensemble cast includes choreographers and performers from across the top of the spectrum of modern, contemporary and hip hop dance performance, including Lot himself,  Gaëlle Bourges, Lou Cantor, Bruce Chiefare, Nathalie Hervé, Marc Lacourt, Bérénice Legrand, Béatrice Massin, Mickaël Phelippeau and Alban Richard.

Lot says these worries were just that, worries.

Danser Ensemble is a team affair like another, he says. “It is very constructed and carefully directed” by Alice Davazoglou, he says, with a base of 26 drawings and an interpretative script to respect, as well as her sound choices and her directorial commentaries on different scenes or movements. She has [two] assistants who work with her to make sure her wishes are clear and understood.

“Developing Danser Ensemble was the easiest and least tense process I’ve ever experienced” Lot says, lingering wonder in his voice. “We put it all together in two weeks and there was no tension. Amazing.”

“I was [also] worried that my partner, Bruce Chiefare, might be a bit mismatched with me – he’s a hip hopper at the top of his career and I’m … a contemporary dancer near retirement”. It turns out that, as a choreographer, Davazoglou has the flair for matchmaking. Lot says it seems spectators also feel as comfortable with the duo with Chiefare as he does: “People say that it looks like we’ve danced together for years...”. He observes that while Chiefare is an energetic hopper at the top of his game, he’s also a bonsai hobbyist, which says a lot about his ability to work well with others.

Xavier Lot feels honored to have been chosen for Danser Ensemble. He has spent a good part of his career working with such underserved populations as immigrants or prisoners, who, he says, like himself, are not born into the circles where contemporary dance is understood as a possible career path.

“I’ve always seen myself not so much as a dance performer but, rather, as an artist dialoguing with creation-creativity using dance…Someone who opens doors for those who might not otherwise have access to the movement arts and who want to be actors and masters of their own movement”.

 “Working with Alice is a privilege”, he says, “A sort of homage to my career in movement art”. Until now, Lot notes, he’s been working with ‘exterior body movement’. In retirement, he says, he will be working on “interior body movement”, developing an existing but part-time Feldenkrais and acupuncture practice.

“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN


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