Carreau du Temple, the renovated former rag market set in the Marais just behind République, celebrates its 10th 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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
