The Best American Poetry

Virginie Roux-Cassé (re-)discovers the sainted woman [By Tracy Danison]

Sainte Jeune Fille à la Licorne © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Carnets pour l’exile: According to tradition, every exile needs to wander aimlessly from time to time, not so much to find a shard of home at the next whiskey bar but to see what there is to see when the city has become your life to live.

Also, a good-hearted exile should think about year-end presents for those at home who have not yet been arrested.

 

Sainte Embrasée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I ran into Virginie Roux-Cassé‘s painting, and Virginie herself, quite by accident some years ago now. Her latest exhibition, called “Les Saintes”, she says, is inspired by an encounter with the Roma holy patron Sainte Sara la Noire, repudiated African Queen of King Herod and servant to holy patrons Saintes Marie-Jacobus and Marie-Salomé*.

 

Sainte Marthe 1 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

“The people pray to [the saints’ icons], venerate them, adore them,” she told me during her opening cocktail the other day, “They dress them, they cover them with, they pile on them, various-patterned, many-colored, golden, ornamented scarves, tunics, coats, crowns, jewels, crosses, rosaries…The beauty, divinity, humanity just bowled me over”.

 

Sainte Sara La Noire © Virginie Roux-Cassée

From that experience, she decided to investigate the lives and deaths of woman Catholic saints: more than a year of portraits in tempera and engravings on the theme is the result.

 

Sainte Marthe, engraving © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I have two paintings by Virginie Roux-Cassé. The one, acrylic or water-based housepaint on fiberboard, is a tilted dry sink (?), a tray (?) of apples hanging just over my dining table. Somebody picked these impish apples from an untended tree in (Virginie’s?) back garden.

 

Sainte Marthe 2 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The other picture –  I call it “Bird Cage” –, in clotted acrylic with smudged newsprint collage, perches above my talk-on-the-phone-red-overstuffed-armchair (since my mother died mostly used with my Son, who lives far away, and Karine, with whom I like to touch a word when she’s away).

 

Sainte Solange © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The Bird Cage is, I think, a lamp or lampshade in crinkly paper (flame-resistant crinoline?) and thick structuring wire with, set alongside it, a small vase. The vase has a big twig of (cherry?) blossoms jammed in it, too big for it. (‘Though you’d not guess it to see her walking home in the evening, Karine sometimes tears off flowering twigs or plucks up flowers and brings them home to make a “found bouquet”. It shocks me. Please don’t call the cops.)

 

Sainte Véronique © Virginie Roux-Cassé

In the foreground of it all I’ve described is a triplet of round fruits. One of the fruits is a distinctly different color than the other two, set slightly but distinctly behind. I sometimes try to make out the smudged newsprint but I’ve never succeeded.

 

Sainte Phanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I bought the impish apples and Bird Cage because Virginie Roux-Cassé’s take on the world around is not mine but is accessible to me, opens a garden gate for my feelings and my imagination. What’s that poem about the path not taken?

 

Sainte La Vierge Stephanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Like everybody else, contemporary artists such as Virginie Roux-Cassé have to come to grips with the increasingly vast pile of past and present and their infinite substacks:  artists, oeuvres, esthetics, theories, concepts, approaches, materials and techniques. Most triangulate their hands at a point between story-telling and radical expression of a reality uniquely within them and what I think of as "esthetic life extensionism".

 

Sainte Mariam © Virginie Roux-Cassé

For story-telling, put somebody like, say, “post-black” painter Rashid Johnson, who did, notably, the interior “Broken Nine” mosaic at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For unique reality, think, say, of Jorinde Voigt, who paints the bio-quantic reality that undergirds our ordinary here-below. For esthetic life extensionism, an artist called Leon Loewentrautsprings to mind. Loewentraut has mastered a certain "Picasso signature style" that enables him to target an Audi-driving market that won’t pay for one of Picasso’s many thousands of second-rate squiggles, can’t afford the real thing, but, nevertheless, aspires to class and taste. 

 

Sainte Blandine © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Virginie Roux Cassé's triangulates someplace between all three. Her distinction is that when I look at her work, I feel her standing looking with me. She's not whispering as an other artist might; sharing the experience of visual emotion is enough.

 

Sainte Jeanette © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I once visited the upper-story greenhouse that serves as her workshop. I was taken aback to see - some unfinished, some painted over with other styles - in recognizable painterly styles lopped about the place. They were well done, too!

 

Sainte Ecervelée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I was taken aback because for me the thing that has marked for me Virginie Roux Cassé's work is that it reminds me of nothing else that I've run into as I look around the world. Among the many excellent painters active today, Virginie Roux Cassée is my very own Le Douanier Rousseau.

 

Sainte Marthe (leading her monster) © Virginie Roux-Cassé

 

Later, it struck me that the discarded “style” paintings did not represent a search to produce an effect or a search for a technique or for a style but rather represent her effort to understand, maybe to find and isolate, an effect on an (herself as an) onlooker. Doing that, she brings out my "emotion of seeing": in dance, I would say that the choreography has enabled the "sensibility" that enables the experience of dance performance.
____

*Saint Sara la Noire is patron of the Roma (or "Gypsy") folk. Many of them claim an origin in India, an, indeed, Wikipedia identifies Saint Sara with the goddess Kali. Saints Mary-Salome, Mother of Saint John, author of the Apocalyptic gospel, Mary-Jacobus, Mother of Saint James the Apostle, along with Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in love, were among the original disciples of Christianity’s Messiah. Most were witness to Jesus Christ's Resurrection. All are mentioned in the canonical gospels. Fleeing Israel in a rudderless boat sometime in the third decade of the present era, these woman disciples of Jesus providentially washed up on the French coast. They were long believed to be the founders of Christianity in France. The pilgrimage site for Saint Sara is at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village in the Camargue.

Contact Virginie Roux-Cassé through her website: virginierouxcasse.com

Carnets pour l’exile: Aina Alègre, “Réverbérations - Etude 8”: the drummer or the drum? [By Tracy Danison]

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre: “Girl, I have a lot of uncontrolled movements”. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As the days go by on pretty much the same dull plan, an exile, as is well known, may get le bourdon, “the bumblebee” or “dull vibes”: up, coffee, listen to the bad news and lies from home, wait for noon, petit blanc, shot at six, carafes of piquet for the rest of the evening, especially if politics comes up.

An exile already with or expecting le bourdon would do well to search out all-round performer choreographer Aina Alègre – I’ve written about her here as a first order energy weaver fitter and genre-breaker: Fitting the right energies instead of matching genres may not be an act of love and resistance but it works well.

Start with her 45-minute solo R-A-U-X-A to get the blood up and moving. As Ry Cooder put it: Folks, it’s a sight! Alègre grabs a body up and shows them how human movement works within the material world -  light, sound and things - to create rhythm, dance and place. To use genre to get at the experience: the difference between Alègre’s dance and, say, the Flamenco gestural from which she picks the most power-infused movement, is that Alègre’s tradition is herself and that she is the movement that animates the world around, not the instrument that plays out an esthetic.

“R-A-U-X-A”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Guillaume-Fraysse

At all times, as her R-A-U-X-A solo shows, Aina Alègre’s creativeness is a universal antidote to the saddening buzz of exile’s existential bagpipe, but her Reverberations 8, because analytical, just one phrase of a series of in-situ performances called ÉTUDES (built around the movements, gestures, dances, figures and narratives associated to tapping or hammering), seems specially designed as therapy for it.

The word “réverbération” points both glimmering light and echo of sound.

Reverberations - Etude 8 takes place, with two exceptions, in silence or, better, in Silence, where all sound comes from. No sound track. No talking. As a set, it is, left-toward center, a handsome full set of drums and full right to center, a projection of meditations or strictures or pensées on a bright-white parking garage breeze-block back wall … – Enter, from far left space, Maenad-like – … setting out, on a repeating loop of commentary and anecdote, Aina Alègre’s ontolo-graphy as a drummer drumming-drum.

The drum set features a clicking metronome clipped to the cymbal stand, which just does not compass Aina Alègre’s moving, moving, moving inner energy, which opens, sustains and closes the show.

 

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As I switch my eyes between her energy dance and the ontolography scrolling on the wall, her ontolography speaks of an early fascination with drums… She was born in 1986… Drums as a thing to hide behind and drumming as a thing to put her in contact with the world… In 1992 she was drumming for a band called Gambas, of coming to drumming through an act of will… It is not beating of the drum that creates sound and rhythm but the nimbleness of the energy flow beating it; women with ears, hear … And more that gets beyond me…

When she – Finally! About half-way through the performance – briefly starts rhythming one of two toms mounted on the kick drum  – all of a few minutes – the metronome has disappeared, is notably absent. She riffs with sticks that start with clicks which turns rapidly into drumming, personal verve and then to simple, resonant, pure sense. Later on, she taps the snare. I think then she’s not drumming: she’s looking for the glimmer and echo of her movement on the drum.

I forget how Reverberations 8 ends.

As people were leaving I was sitting looking at the stage hearing the echo of Alègre’s words and I heard many praise her drumming skill. We’d all been enchanted.

____

I saw “Réverbérations - Etude 8” on 8 November at Ménagerie du Verre, which continues strong after the death of Marie Thérèse Allier, its founder and proprietor, on smaller productions of contemporary dance performance. See Beyond Words: “Marie-Thérèse Allier, literary talk, dance-performance criticism” and “Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise queerly”. I most recently saw “R-A-U-X-A” on 13 November 2024 at Carreau du Temple in the Marais. “R-A-U-X-A” wears very well.

“R-A-U-X-A” places & dates, 2025

29 March 2025 – Conde Duque, Madrid, Espagne

22, 23 & 24 May 2025 - Chaillot – Théâtre national de la danse, Paris, France

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley leave the Ballet de Lorraine: how to say goodbye good [By Tracy Danison]

“CRWDSPCR” by Merce Cunningham, v. Jacobsson/Caley 2024. Photo © Ronan Muller, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are leaving the Ballet de Lorraine at the end of 2024, so on 6 November 2024 I went to see their swan song at the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy.

My goodbye to them is to point everybody else to their legacy in the smart and effective development of people and to develop talent. I’ve already talked about how they made of the Ballet de Lorraine an enterprise of “many in one”, rather than “one from many”. I’ve written about this in Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine and Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: a point in time, a line, the line, a period, instantly and forever. Their vision of choreographic enterprise suits the human needs of performers and prepares them for the challenge of repertories that span not only time and taste but multiple socio-cultural paradigms. As promoters of culture, Jacobsson, born in Stockholm, and Caley, born in Michigan, USA, who met in early 1990s New York and have led the Ballet de Lorraine for better than 10 years now, make no secret of their appreciation of the opportunities of an open world system as well as France’s unique system for encouraging and sustaining arts and culture. Big fans of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, as artists, they are careful to frame their work and the work of others, new and old, as part of the common evolution: Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience.

So, that’s what I think.

However, like so many others in my increasingly long life, Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley have chosen to say goodbye in their own, irrational, inexplicable, ineffable way, forcing me to go to the trouble of interpreting said “goodbye”.

First, what’s the traditional protocol for goodbye?

In antiquity, Archilochus mocks the barbarian waving the shield he (Archilochus) had left behind as he (Archilochus) decamped from a losing fight. I believe Archilochus also mentions that when he’s dead, he’ll miss eating figs. I guess that “goodbye” has always been personal about the individual.

But, contrary to what study of Archilochus might suggest, goodbye is not just about the sovereign “I” decamping or dying. It’s also about “You & I“ and “our” Separating(s). Not just what the one good-byer leaves behind but what the other good-byer keeps from the encounter. Acknowledging this truth, Italian-speakers say “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for hello and “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for goodbye: “hello-goodbye”.

 

“Fugitive archives” by Latifa Laâbissi. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

In the vein of hello-goodbye, the Venerable Bede’s Deathsong uses the Northumbrian to suggest that

Fore thaem neidfaerae ‖ naenig uuiurthit
thoncsnotturra, ‖ than him tharf sie
to ymbhycggannae ‖ aer his hiniongae
huaet his gastae ‖ godaes aeththa yflaes
aefter deothdaege ‖ doemid uueorthae.

Excuse my clunky here-belowness in perspective, but it seems to me that, in a proper hello-goodbye, nothing can beat the traditional advice to prospective brides.

We are all (helpless child) brides of our little destinies, not so? And, upon saying goodbye, the feckless maiden says hello to the knowing wife and to meet the occasion must have, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

For the first part of their hello-goodbye – Program 1 – Jacobsson and Caley chose to hand their stage to Ballet de l’Opéra - Grand Avignon for a performance of Emilio Calcagno’s D’un matin de Printemps (2022). Calcagno, whose work has been characterized as “unclassifiable”, was born in Sicily, came to study dance in France in 1989 and stayed to make good.

D’un matin de Printemps, with 14 dance performers and three musicians, uses tableau-style choreographies and the electronic sound of composer Matteo Franceschini to bring its audience into a fresh, slantendicular, connection with classic composers Ravel, Debussy, Satie and Boulanger. “I chose 19^th and 20^th French composers [for D’un matin de Printemps] because this rich, elegant and, especially, artistically free part of the contemporary period invites diversity of interpretation…. Everything in it lends itself re-interpretation: rhythm, pulse, movement, tempo…”

The second part – Program 2 –  includes CRWDSPCR by Merce Cunningham, Fugitive Archives by Latifa Laâbissi and Mesdames et Messieurs by Jacobsson and Caley.

 

“Mesdames et Messieurs” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

First conjured in 1993, CRWDSPCR – like the mechanical signaling gestures that mark the piece, the title is a nod and wink at punch-card bureaucratic “condensation” of language – is an iconic visualization of technological civilization: frenetic movement and urgent information high in color. Also, CRWDSPCR recalls Cunningham’s (and John Cage’s) revolutionary notion that choreography and music are independently intended, co-existing rather than joined, in dance performance. With a performance for the Montpellier Dance festival, CRWDSPCR became part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s repertory in July, 2024.

Both Jacobsson and Caley danced with Cunningham’s company from 1993 into the naughties.Laâbissi’s Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs were part of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s celebration of the centenary of the Ballets Suédois (in Paris). They premiered 18 May 2022 at the Opéra national de Lorraine at Nancy. Fugitive, for eight woman-only performers in checkered dresses with bell flairs and, along with a Wizard-of-Oz-Munchkin esthetic, something of the chaotic Shadoks cartoon to them – troubling, droll, grotesque and erotic. Fugitive, a performance that is almost a dance, borrows heavily from the imagery – but not the choreography – archives of the Marchand des oiseaux from Ballets Suèdois.

Mesdames et Messieurs is a reinvention of Cinésketch, a one-shot slapstick parody of “adultery comedy” created by the painter Francis Picabia and directed by writer René Clair and presented in the dying days of the Ballets Suèdois. Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley present an (almost) entirely masculine cast enjoying the game of love in a wacky and colorful Eros Triumphant.

Later, I joined them for dinner at a brasserie near the central train station called L’Excelsior, a place where the beer advertisements as well as the woodwork and stained glass are works of art. I asked how D’un matin de Printemps, CRWDSPCR, Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs represent “something new, old, borrowed and blue”.

Thomas Caley’s answer is succinct. He points out that all the pieces are doing something “new” as performed “now”, whether in concept or choreography and or as pure invention, as re-invention, or as renewal of or from something “old” and “borrowed”: concept, choreography, phrases, figures, sounds, music, décors, costumes, visuals, intentions.

Jacobsson nods agreement at this: nothing is pulled from thin air.

But the couple is flummoxed when I ask “What about something blue?”, which I have explained is, traditionally, a garter, the symbolic gateway to the erotic. So, I do it for them. I point Mesdames et Messieurs a male-male game of love that, quite accidentally and with no ill-effect on what I might have called a “homoerotic” review, can have two women in it.

Hello-goodbye.

Hans Josephsohn, sculptor of genius, artistic heritage, Solomon Grundy and Emily Dickinson [By Tracy Danison]

Untitled, undated, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Musée de l’art moderne de Paris

Sick of your compatriots after months of gazing anxiously into their inscrutable faces? Thinking of Paris as a place where you might get away from all that? It’s not all a bad idea. Remember, though, that, here-below, in the hell nobody’s yet out of, a body’s only defense against reality is absorption in something interesting.

Thus disabused, a body may, for a while, calmly say goodbye to the home front with a visit to an interesting exhibit called Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, a life-time retrospective of the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn at the Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

It’s hard to find an adjective to describe Josephson’s work. He kept himself to himself pretty much; he has been little shown outside Switzerland. Albert Oehlen, a contemporary multi-materials artist who first came to attention as an art scene bad boy in Germany in the 1980s, and is curator of the exhibit, discovered Josephsohn’s work when he visited Kesselhaus Josephsohn, a dedicated storage and display space. Kesselhaus Josephsohn was founded in 2003 as part of the Sitterwerk arts and culture complex in St Gallen, Switzerland, where Oehlen lives.  Oehlen’s adjective is to organize the show around the sculptor’s life-process of creation: chronological, closing with a totem by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren (b. 1964) - taken from Oehlen’s personal collection. Josephsohn’s all there, Oehlen’s adjective says, words just get in the way.

Oehlen’s right.

Untitled surface,1950-1951, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Tracy Danison

I was a little breathless when I got to the top of the stair where the exhibit begins. When I looked up, I stopped wheezing to goggle breathless: morsels of whole sense, visual haikus. Haikus, haikus everywhere and nothing to do but look. This Hans Josephsohn guy is about how eyes make feelings, processes of creation.

In plaster or bronze, bits of wall, classic-shape kores, faces and figures capture visual expectation and form. A little section of stone wall full enough image to make signs enough to make portents… But then, it’s a stone wall, natural, made, size, rock pieces, rock types, cracks, fissures, surfaces, fractures, filler, place. It’s a stone wall. I see not so much “essence” as the fleeting sense of the whole thing.

From beginning to end, I had the feeling that I was noticing each thing for the first time.  Shape, texture, relief, light, associate into visual clues into perception, into posture (movement) into character, into personality. Toward the end I was looking at heads were mysterious, maybe ancient, because their personality had been lost to time.

 

Untitled female figure, 1957, Hans Josephsohn Photo © Katalin Deér, Josephsohn Estate

 

If it’s hard to find a single adjective to define the work, it’s even more difficult describe the feeling that Hans Josephsohn and the experience of his work inspire in me.

Born in Konigsberg in 1920, Josephsohn died in Zurich in 2012.  As a Jew in post-1933 Germany, the boy was refused entry to his local art school. In 1938, he got a scholarship to study in Florence. He arrived just in time to be expelled under Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali. Fleeing to Switzerland, he found a friend in sculptor Otto Müller (1905-1993) before he was interned at the start of the world war in 1939. Josephsohn began working again in 1943. In a film about him and his work, he remarks that he has never visited Auschwitz, where his family was presumably murdered as he began his career; he was afraid a memorial might distract attention from them.

Although this is the first Josephsohn exhibition in France (and perhaps in Europe outside of Switzerland), the contemporary artist and culture activist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) featured certain of Josephsohn’s sculptures in Third Mind, a 2007 group show of contemporary artists at Palais de Tokyo. Rondinone wanted to build a heritage frame for the younger generation he was featuring.

From all this, my feeling creates Josephsohn as a created artist’s elder artist, genius honored by posthumous recognition rather than cold cash and a coffee. Josephsohn was sandwiched into the helpless tragedy of human existence both by natural routine,

 

Hans Josephsohn, 2004.Photo © Katalin Deér, Kesselhaus Josephsohn

 

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday, 
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
Poor Solomon Grundy

… and a need to work and work and work, some work to keep thought at bay, some work to get the expression of vision just right. Like Emily Dickinson,

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

________

Properly called “Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen”, the life-time retrospective is part of a triptych exhibition called “Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices”: a museum-wide sweep of history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

"Grande Mess" & "Le Sacre du Sucre" harness history to sense and beauty in Guadeloupe’s past and present [By Tracy Danison]

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Service communication Artchipel Scène Nationale de la Guadeloupe

The dance performance Grande Mess by Clémence Baubant starts with three young woman dance performers of color from Guadeloupe standing front of stage, left. Grande Mess, local French for “high mass”, the choreographers say, does not reference the Christian ritual. The performers wear black molding leotards, are in among two unequally-high white pedestals, like high steps; they stand on the blocks, stretch and gesture elegantly, drape themselves in the air, show themselves off, fun each other; there’s drum music in the distance. When they move off, I notice there are long, braided cords slung over their athletic shoulders.

Sugar island, dark skin, auction blocks, braided cords, showing themselves off. Why, that must be. Slave sale, with bullwhip.

Of course!

However, when the women have sashayed to the center stage and segued into costumes of white panties over black leotard with banana leaf halters and the far off music has become whole-stage present, the slave market story doesn’t make much sense.

With my casual racism out of the way as well as taken into consideration in terms of my reflections, in my experience of Clémence Baubant’s (and Lenablou’s) pieces, I think I’ve discovered something I had never thought about. It never occurred to me to imagine a body schema not centered around itself but rather from a point of contact in movement space. It seems to me that in Grande Mess, the three women’s dance begins at the soles of their feet, at the contact point with the ground, not, or at least it has seems to me, from the first or, root, chakra – as for instance you see in Martha Graham’s dance technique. As they progress through Grande Mess, the performers, Clémence Baubant, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin, do not so much balance their bodies as shape them in the air, as if dancing a reflexology foot chart.

 

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Artchipel

 

In experience, though, Grande Mess makes a unique demonstration of dance feeling. There is no mention of a particular technique or of dance feeling in the Grande Mess notes. However, the notes do declare the intention to explore the intimate relation of the body to walking while recalling (chthonic) figures such as  such Ladjablès (“La Diablesse”) a Wild Woman, who re-balances the man-woman relationship gone to whack, or Mûlatresse Solitude(“Mulatta Solitude”), a real-life “mixed-race” anti-slavery leader turned Guadeloupe origin myth.

All this of suggests to me “point of contact” and fusion, rather than “center” as technical approach. Indeed, Baubant’s choreography fuses different movements into a body’s natural rhythm. As I watch, I see shades of traditional dancing from Africa with maybe even a jig from Europe with break attitude with Rock&Roll exuberance with line-dance execution with ballroom kaleidoscoping with personal expressionism with … I don’t know what-all! This is not to say, Grande Mess is potpourri de danse bouncing here and there: Grande Mess is all vertical motion, ether-wards, rippling up out of the Earth and pulsing through the air.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Ernesto S. Mandap

 

I felt the “point of contact/soles of the feet/vertical motion” theme as equally present in the second piece of the evening’s double bill, Le Sacre du Sucre (“The Rite of Sugar”), featuring the celebrated Guadeloupe dance performer and choreographer, Lenablou (or Léna Blou). Again, the notes make no mention of a particular approach, but explain that Le Sacre du Sucre is in the tradition of GwoKa, a dance practice that uses call and response and Ka-drum rhythms to initiate then shape a “spontaneous” dance. It strikes me that the premise is “The waters are not divided, so make the world”.

Le Sacre du Sucre, the notes declare, means to bring spectators into a story that is rooted, on the one hand, in the de-humanization of the body that historical slavery requires, on the other hand, in the unexpected, the unlikely and the unforeseeable in that same history.

As experience, Le Sacre du Sucre works out as an origin story. The question is: how does music exist? The answer is: contact with the world around and its rhythms.

The piece opens with what I think of as a dance floor in a poor, hot, country café.  Two men, one woman. Drum sound in the wind, but no music. Too poor a place, I reckon, for a Victrola record player; must be a ménage à trois in the vein of Porgy & Bess, maybe Frankie & Johnny. Lenablou and her two men begin rough, awkward, slow. I think, like a couple dealing with an interloper who is by no means a third wheel.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Alexandre Boissot

 

And here is where it turns from a chronology to an ontology: all three are such practiced performers, their awkwardness also hints of them as guests at a party thrown by people who are new to them. This is not after all a story of what happens but of taking shape.

The drum sound takes on rhythm as the three continue together, are there, become practiced, letting in the sound of the world around through contact with their little space and with each other, by creating…  The performers, Lenablou, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou don’t just pick up the sound, they find it in the world around.

The men begin to rhythm the poor tables as if they were drums, bringing in effect what is distant near… With feet on the ground and hands searching the air, Lenablou makes their rhythm into dance, into a place where she can be together … They put on “sound shoes” (designed by performer Félix Flauzin). These transform the point of contact with the earth to music with their movement.  

By the time the performers are taking their bows, they have defined themselves as individuals synching and falling out of synch, that is, they have gone from movement to rhythm, to dance to music …

Lenablou shows creation: it is a dance we all do.

_________

I saw “Grande Mess” and “Le Sacre du Sucre” at Carreau du Temple 10 October 2024.

“Grande Mess” is a creation of Clémence Baubant, with performance by her, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin; dramaturgy by Mathilde Rance; scenographic creation by Anais Verspan; sound by Yannick Berbié; light by Marion Jouhanneau. Click for more on Clémence Baubant.

“Le Sacre du Sucre” is a creation of Lenablou (also written Léna Blou) with performance by her, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou, assisted by James Carles; with music directed by Daniel Trépy; sound by Steeve Lancastre; and sound accessories by Félix Flauzin; light by Roger Olivier. Click for more on Lenablou.

Alexandra Lacroix’s “Entre nous, les saisons”: How to perform climate catastrophe [By Tracy Danison]

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

I was Googling an equivalent for du lard du cochon and ran across the factoid that, before the 18th century, there were two seasons.

From about 4000 BC until then, annual events worth remarking bore holy names such as Saint Répétition or quaint ones such as Awakening of the Groundhog in the different dead languages.

Great, mysterious things then began to happen. Going on into the 18th century, believing firmly that making stuff was understanding it, and sure that anyhow it could all be reconciled to Biblical accounts, people started hairsplitting scientifically. Thus encouraged, taxonomy (phylum, order, genus, species) and industry began to proliferate.

Antonio Vivaldi was in 1723 thereby enabled to add Spring and Fall to our calendar and compose his celebrated Four Seasons concerti. Scrapping the wordy “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” his wonderful Seasons formalize a compact and gorgeous “natural world”, which, pretty much, exists to provide the lake and lightning that will henceforth inspire all aspiring Mary Shelleys and their shitty little boyfriends to write their own Frankensteins.

The inconvenience of another take on the world was documented in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in late Summer, 2019: Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes.The “natural world” is as difficult to intellectually and morally shake off as its wordier predecessor. And, so much the worse for humanity, it is increasingly more difficult to maintain Nature at anything like service-optimal levels.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

Alexandra Lacroix’s dance performance, Entre nous, les saisons (“Between you and me, the seasons”), imagines “the fragility of [human] being” (in the environment) not as an alternative to the beguiling notion of a world all our own but as a more perceptive and sensible way of looking at it: Fragility is U. As a description of material peril and of the human role, “fragility” does a better job of highlighting humanity’s situation in the natural world than “(inter)dependent” and a far better job than “should be responsible”, that’s for sure.

The brilliant part of Alexandra Lacroix’s show is that she knows fragility is about showing and talk always gets to “should”: more do, less words.

The theater is a big hall, a concrete floor, bleacher-bucket seating; the stage is the space between the first row and the wall. To churn up a fragile ambiance, she uses musicians riffing on the Four Seasons with electronic and traditional instruments, amateur rock climbers, and scaffolding. The set is complemented with familiar images of the leafy and green and spectacular natural world projected through the scaffolding and on the back wall and sometimes accompanied by little NPR-tone talking.

The rest is metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, what have you.

The climbers clamber and fall and grunt and sweat up around and over scaffolds that give the impression of being stocked on, rather than part of, the set. A couple of the musicians, loosely centered among the scaffold struts and beams try out riffs and phrases and variations on the Seasons concerti. The climbers, singular and together, are absorbed in talk of choices, defeats and successes.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

In terms of the rhythm and pace of movement and interaction, sometimes the climbers seem to lead the musicians, sometimes to follow them, sometimes musicians or climbers use the set environment as a sound board or an instrument or a challenge. Seasons is an actor: the concerti have shared History but also personal intimacy – I have stared out the window at the frozen Earth to the rattle of steam heat and Spring. The riffs and phrases and variations bounce against my expectations of Vivaldi, not those I have for the musicians.

In sum, as fragility-awareness training, Lacroix’s piece works really well. I was absorbed into its gentle (very subtly organized) chaos – trying to identify riffs on Vivaldi and mostly failing, for instance; the gentle chaos gently unsettles me, makes me feel my vulnerability, without scaring me. Fear’s an important factor. Low dramatic tension means low resistance to what’s happening. Maybe  

my sense of vulnerability implies that the world around can and does act on and without me; it has agency.

Fragility of being, Entre nous les saisons’ gentle chaos suggests, is about me, not about the meanness of the hard hard world. And, when it’s all said and done, what’s about me is about you.

_______

I saw “Entre nous, les saisons” at Théatre de l’Aquarium, 18 September 2024, directed by Alexandra Lacroix assisted by Raphaëlle Blin, with musicians from l’Ensemble Le Printans et climber/performers
Oscar Villamizar Rueda, Sarah Rochereau, Aymeric Schultze. Sound by Jérôme Baillet, video by Jérémie Bernaert
and set by Fanny Laplane
with assistance from Laura Bauchet.

Tarsila do Amaral: breaking out from Woman Invisibility [By Tracy Danison]

"A Cuca, 1924”. Photo © Ville de Grenoble - Musée de Grenoble. Photo: J.L. Lacroix

Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), whose work is on show at the Musée du Luxembourg until February 2025, is a painterly personality of special vision and real skill. Were she a man, she would by this time be eponymous for a genre, like Magritte or Braque. I say that flatly, with a cowboy hat and boots, bold and belligerent. Through a series of quirks of family life and 20^th century politics, a sufficient oeuvre of a truly original (woman) painter has managed to survive the Woman Invisibility (Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 25/5/2023) process.

The bulk of the work in the exhibition, about 150 pieces, mostly dates from do Amaral’s mid-30s to late-40s and includes works such as Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923, A Negra, 1923 or A Cuca, 1924 that have been appreciated, but outside an oeuvre.

“Academia n°4, 1922”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

Tarsila do Amaral’s painterly skill and particular ability to project a personal vision is patent the moment you walk into the exhibition. To the left, sure lines of Academia n°4, 1922 put an “academic” nude into sublime motion. To the right, a top-prize exercise of the expressionist-cubist-surrealist environment she’s working in.

"Caipirinha, 1923". Photo © Ding Musa

A bit further on, I am especially touched by portraits of herself and her second husband, Oswald de Andrade. 

Do Amaral's portrait, Auto-retrato I (Self-portrait 1), 1924, composed photo-realistically, has an indefinable but unmistakable trace of tough brushed into it. 

“Auto-retrato I, 1924”. Photo © Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Governmental Palaces of the State of São Paulo. Photo: Romulo Fialdini

Oswald’s portrait, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923, photo-realistic under an expressionist composition, layers in tender. I say “tough”, “tender” trying to convey the idea that do Amaral fuses in a sensibility rather than a feeling or a label: angry, easy, butch, femme.

“Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923”. Photo © Acervo Museu de Arte Brasileira – MAB FAAP, São Paulo. Photo: Fernando Silveira

Other faces show this same kind of subtle fusion of sensibility into the composition. I am thinking of the foregrounded face of a worker in a rice field in “Trabalhadores, 1938”. I say to myself, working for peanuts in water up to his knees to support a large family, not, Despair. Despair is too broad and too narrow for what do Amaral draws my attention to.

 

Trabalhadores, 1938”. Photo © MASP

Many if not most paintings that caught my attention are composed of well-defined, brightly-colored shapes and forms that are arranged in, often enough, dreamy-versions of otherwise typical scenes – garden, street, figure in a (desert) landscape, for instance.

"Floresta,1929". Photo © Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo Romulo Fialdini

These compositions engage me on two levels. On the first level the elements compose a narrative, conjure a visual place. The narrative is structured to point a parallel second level of engagement where all the different elements of the first exist independently, in un-narrative space.

“Distância, 1928”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Though it’s a first impression, it seems to me that this quality of pointing from element of composition to thing for itself, from place to space, distinguishes do Amaral from the scrum and ruck of the approaches in her time, especially Cubist or Surrealist work.

“O Touro, 1928”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

It seems to me the colorful reductions and fabulous arrangements of, say, Picasso’s Cubism underline the narrative quality of composition. De Chirico’s or Magritte’s Surrealism or distortion of forms and de-familiarization tend to question the on-looker’s interpretation of visual narrative rather than assert the act of composition-imagination, as Tarsila do Amaral does.

 

"Passagem de nivel III, 1965". Photo © Jaime Acioli

The documentation makes a strong case for do Amaral as an actor on a broader artistic scene in Paris from the turn of the century into the 20-30s of the previous century. She situates, according to this, in a cultural climate where an interest in African and other indigenous arts give her permission to use her personal – but what they call “Brazilian” – experience in her own art.

“Carnaval em Madureira, 1924”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Husband Oswald even wrote a pamphlet for do Amaral’s little group of Paris Brazilians proclaiming “cannibal art” – meaning that it is by “eating up” (absorbing) European painterly nous, the Brazilians, including do Amaral, create a syncretized, unique, “Brazilian” form of art.

 

"Porto I, 1953". Photo © MASP

So, building on her ability to depict her lived cultural environment in modern/European style, as a subject of art commentary, Tarsila exists as a “national Brazilian”. However, even if she did fit herself into this national identity story, I am not convinced by it.

“A Negra, 1923”. Photo: © Romulo Fialdini

Looking around, I just don’t think there is much of anything other than Tarsila do Amaral that is especially or exclusively “Brazilian” in her work. Otto Dix, who was from Germany and served in the German Imperial army and painted all those shocking World War 1 scenes from German trenches and German streets, is not classed as a “national German” painter but known rather as a particularly acute observer and Expressionist painter of war, like Goya.

 

"Terra,1943". Photo © Marcio Rangel

I say, let do Amaral be Tarsila and let’s let her paint her vision of her experience, wherever she acquired it. I say, she tagged herself as Brazilian because she could exist publicly in it, and, between her sex and her family and her society, there weren’t many places she could do that – the label protected her work from Woman Invisibility. That’s enough.

 

“Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923”. Photo © Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Ibram, Rio de Janeiro, Photo: Jaime Acioli

Tarsila do Amaral is an artist, a painter, a woman, a Brazilian for the whole world.

___________

Cecilia Braschi
is the curator of “Tarsila do Amaral: Peindre le Brésil moderne” at the Musée du Luxembourg until 2 February 2025. The show will move to the Guggenheim Bilbao for an exhibition that begins in February and lasts into June 2025. Tarsila do Amaral’s works previously figured in a 2018 solo exposition in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Latin American painter series that featured Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García.

Sandrine Juglair and the real story behind snips, snails and puppy dog tails [By Tracy Danison]

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Roll over Judith Butler and tell Germaine Greer the news!

With her dance performance DICKLOVE, Sandrine Juglair, circus-trained choreographer and performer, in a little under an hour, performs all we know and all we need to know about performing gender. She entertains, to boot.

I’ve suspected it for a long time and Juglair’s performance confirmed it. Snips, snails and puppy dog tails are what make a boy. What makes a girl is mostly a boy in makeup through the cheap mirror of what a boy imagines as the perfect object of desire: sugar, spice and everything nice.

Somehow, before I saw it put into dance performance in DICKLOVE, I was still thinking gendering had a bit more to it than that. But, I realize, not. As with so many things that are a part of the ordinary routine of living, getting words around gendering takes so many words and so much time that one comes to think it must be complex: ex multiplicitate, profunditatem, from complexity, profundity.

Well-made dance performance such as Juglair’s gets a body beyond all the narrative bushwa.

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Just to state it out loud, the problem of gendering is in its consequences on individuals, not its signs. Its processes are just another story made up from tics and feints and so-called suspension of disbelief that put a gun to people’s heads according to exteriorized genitalia. The real reason critics of feminism claim the feints and tics are natural and observable is that understanding otherwise engages individual and social responsibility, all anathema to a real boy. Surely strutting and fretting a boy’s manly on his stage can be no vice!

As Juglair performs it, the key points of boy-ness or male gendered-ness or masculinity are broad at the shoulder, maybe a penis pouch, a certain crook to a leg that suggests a fighter’s crouch, tongue-tied-ness, a cigarette, brandished, a failure, an excuse, and a hero fantasy. All these cues and clichés are also found in Jimmy Dean’s Big Bad John(1961), the frisson of masculine heroism of which reminded me that to avoid unpleasant consequences, a boy bettermake the man or fake it well enough to pass. Not having been born in northern Ohio, Juglair has never heard Big Bad John. But, of course, like everybody else from everywhere, she has heard of it in some other, equally ubiquitous, and somehow unarguable, culture message. As a girl-kid budding athlete, she says, she instinctively let the boys win the races.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE got Karine and I talking about the ineffable appeal of Donald Trump. As unpleasant as that is, we also realized that “crouch-tongue-tied-ness-cigarette-brandished-failure-excuse-hero-fantasy” is meant to seduce the audience by exposing his, the Donald’s beating heart of boy-ness. To his followers, the threats, auto-exculpation and hero-fantasy that structure his speeches, feel right, are attractive, are catnip, to his followers.

 Indeed, the boy has made the man.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE is as fine a piece of performance as you’ll find.

______

We saw DICKLOVE by Juglair at Théâtre Silvia Monfort, Paris, on 3 October 2024, played by herself,  Sandrine Juglair, assisted by Claire Dosso, Aurélie Ruby, with costumes by Léa Gadbois-Lamer, sound by Lucas Barbier, lighting by Julie Méreau, assisted by Marie Roussel, set by Max Heraud, Etienne Charles and La Manufacture (Switzerland).

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put Behind The Line on your bucket list.

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

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

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

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

 

“Echo” by Simon Feltz. Photo © Greg Ponthus

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

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

_________________

“Echo”, dance performance by Simon Feltz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and ends with its “I got life”:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Performance thumbnails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballet de Lorraine performers

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

Static Shot

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

Malón

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

Click for Ballet de Lorraine in Europe, Summer 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he says, with emphasis.

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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