Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference [By Tracy Danison]

Festival Every Body, at Carreau du Temple between 9 and 13 February, bills itself as dance, performance and material art focused on the human body, the one behind the eyes and arranged by the clothes.  For the festival’s producers and sponsors, this body is the theater of the cultural mind, a place to put difference on display and let spectators and participants consider how bodies are culturally appropriated.

Participating creators are savvier, more professional and imaginative than even. If the previous two Every Body festivals foreshadow this third, performances will be especially well-thought-through and well-executed. Names include: Julien Andujar, Collectif Famille Maraboutage, Valeria Giuga, Kamilė Gudmonaitė, Marta Izquierdo Muñoz, Benjamin Kahn, Georges Labbat, Nach, Sylvain Riéjou, Alexandre Roccoli and Nina Vallon. In fact, looking at the list, I’m wondering if 2024 won’t be the year Every Body hits its stride as a project …

Discovering difference – gender, age, color, ability, sexuality – highlights much that is subtle and tough, obvious and sweet, also funny, about our cultures and perceptions. The process works by edging right up on to what a body may have thought absurd and playing it out.

For instance. Everybody, Every Body, more or less, has tits.

Right? So, we say, “man-tits”? Why “man”? Why not just “tits”? Why not “woman-tits”?

Well, because gendering suggests that if I, a man, say “My tits”, I’m jokingly complaining (sadly, in an unmanly way) about how fat I’ve become with appetite that doesn’t seem to age with me. Thus, “man tits” instead of “tits”.

Were I, on the other hand, of the woman persuasion, of original socio-biological condition as may have been, aging as fatly as may be, talking tits would be a far more complex, even dangerous, proposition.

As a “star”, for example, “tits” as subject or object, big or otherwise, might very well signal that grabbing a body’s pussy is fine work if the grabber is entitled to it; a grabber’s disappointment might well get a body a good, sound raping behind a ready-to-wear rack.

So, as I say, discovering difference highlights the subtle and tough, obvious and sweet. It’s also funny.

This time, though, I think I will go to Festival Every Body to get beyond discovering difference.

There are a couple of things that make me think redoing my critical eyes might be a good idea: the quality of Every Body 2024’s featured creators, a performance at Every Body 2023 called SHOMMES XY by Julie Lamoine and a chat I had with my Son on a lingering evening last July – our first after quite a long while.

From early days, a chat with my Son has been very much like a chat with Gargantua.

My Son asked me what, exactly, beyond currently “obvious physical differences” such as gender or skin color, what is “difference” and why do I believe something is “different” or the “same”? “Seems to me, Dad”, says this child of a new paradigm, “Most ‘difference’ is either obvious or desirable for the spectators “discovering” it or just too personal to make part of critical scrutiny.”

In other words, my Son suggests, who but the bribed judge treasures unequal treatment under law? Who but the psychopath embraces cruelty? Who but the charlatan claims to know the celestial mechanics of a tender heart? “The obvious, desirable and personal don’t really count for much in the big picture, Dad” he said, gulping down his pint before concluding, “If they did, there would be no bribed judges, cruelty or charlatans. Right?”.

Julie Lamoine’s SHOMMES XY featured a Down syndrome performer who was neither added into the performance nor a central part of the theme, but rather just another part in the whole performance, like a non Down syndrome performer. How the devil did she work that one out, Julie Lamoine?

In thinking about Lamoine’s good trick, I realized that, ordinarily, I judge from a whole performance, the synthesis of movement in time – flow, sensibility, experience –  outward towards the particular contributions – choreography, cast, scene –  but with SHOMMES XY I focused so automatically and persistently on the Down performer that I noticed that Julie Lamoine had choreographed the difference theme in her piece so that I was forced to think more about what I do ordinarily in terms of measuring a piece of work than what I do when discovering difference.

Finally, in looking at the creators and performances on offer for Every Body 2024, I think I see working with “difference” to make art rather than using art to represent difference – in the manner of Julie Lemoine. I know virtually all this year’s creators for work other than what will be presented at the Festival. This gives me critical reference points and guard rails as I think about and measure their work.

So, to sum it up, the knot I’d like to helplessly pick at this year is the link between what my Son called “obvious difference”, with all its socioculturopolitical baggage, and the origami of infinite difference that is the envelope and substance of both art and the individual. 

For my other appreciations of difference see “About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2022 or  “Imagine “Guérillères”: gender and the warring spirit”: Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 2021

       

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