Summer’s over. Atelier de Paris just sent me a “Tour d’horizon” of its Fall 2024 dance performance offer: 100% new creation and pretty much a compendium of what’s up in contemporary dance and performance.
The wide play and density of the offer reminds me that the challenge of appreciating dance performance is accepting the premise(s). Accepting premises isn’t suspending disbelief and doesn’t involve so much mindfulness, a skill, as patience, a virtue.
Virtue is better than skill. While virtue holds the inner monkey at bay, skill just polishes the brute’s shines. Mindfulness is directive, acquisitive, good for business and war. Patience resists the impulse to make everything one’s own, assign it a cause, imagine its effects, tag it and put a price on it.
Part of the goodness in dance performance generally is certainly the opportunity it affords to practice virtue. Patience in dance-performance spectating, for instance, in addition to resisting the inner monkey, may often require raking up the courage to resist outer monkeys, too. Remember when the Wicked Witch of the West tosses a ball of fire at Scarecrow, cackling, “Want to play a little ball, Straw Man”? Scarecrow flinches, sure, but they hang on to the end of a tale that says so much more about American life than Scarecrow could have ever learned at school. Attaboy, Scarecrow!
As a fact, Atelier de Paris opens its creative rentrée with a street-lawn party combo that, as well as patience, fêtes community and commitment: the completion of choreographer Joanna Leighton’s Cycle des Veilleurs (“Cycle of Watchers”) #2 in the 12th arrondissement. As with her other Veilleur events, for each of the 365 days in the year, a local-area resident has volunteered an hour to watch at sundown or sunset from an “object-shelter” (designed by architect Benjamin Tovo) and set up on a high point in the area. That’s it, Veilleurs just watch, not watch out nor watch for, nor watch out for, just watch.
Leighton, who put together the notable People United (which premiered at Atelier de Paris in 2021) has a flair for identifying the essential in an idea and choreographing involvement with it. The Veilleurs party starts with a potential base of 730 fêtards walking in loose parade from Place du Cadran Solaire Papillon to the Atelier at the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes, where a picnic with post-prandial memory-share is planned.
It seems a good plan to jump from the Veilleurs to the new performances, which begin with a spot light on Lithuania. Lukas Karvelis’ solo piece She dreamt of being washed away to the coast recalls a popular folktale while Vilma Pitrinaitė’s When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, a performance around the repercussions of the Ukraine war in the post-colonial Baltic.
Myriam Gourfink does Rêche (“Raw”), a choreography for seven based on yoga breathing techniques. Pierre Pontvianne,about whose Motifs I’ve previously written here, presents Kernel-matières, an introduction to dance performance gesture and part of a seven-part piece called oe matière, meant as an immersive effort to “bring alive the stuff of performance outside the set in order to feel it and share it in a different light”. Motifs is part of the oe septet.
With Japan-born performer Yuri Itabashi soloing the title, Maxime Kurvers, who focuses on dance anthropology, has put together an un-NÔ NÔ play au feminin called Okina (“Old Man”). Taken by the same impulse to re-contextualize, Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains (“Distances”), feels out performance textured from observation of routine experience, in this case, New York and the high mountains of Switzerland and Japan.
Ruth Childs, choreographer-performer of Fantasia, an exceptional performance, returns to the Atelier with Fun Times,funnin’ out multiple layers of sense and experience in “fun”. Julie Gouju’s L’InesthétiqueManège (“Ugly Merry-go-round”), uses expressive dance not so much to flesh out meaning but give flesh to a specifically teenage emotion-feeling-reception model.
Current issues find their place, too. Tiran Willemse, Marine Colard, Ikram Benchrif and Paul Girard have come up with what you might call “docu-performance” pieces. Willemse’s blackmilk deconstructs gender, constructs queer and ponders the sadness in the black male heart. Benchrif & Girard’s Nichoir 93 multimedia performance asks How many charitable gestures make a home? And finally, Marine Colard, who wrote and performed Tir sacré, a successful send-off on sports commentary, takes a look at oratory as an art with Bataille Générale.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
