“Portrait” by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La PieuvreNot too terribly long ago, for my getting-ready-for-bed tirade, I was telling my partner that dance performance creators don’t pay enough attention to the effect they make on spectators. “I’m telling you, Karine,” I muttered, “They waste their time on their same-old same-old stories and politics”. … I pull my tee-shirt over my head, slide down my pants, shake them off my ankles, sit heavily on the bed. “Worse,” I growl, “They aren’t attentive enough to the psycho-physics of movement, visuals, traditional stagecraft and choreography, how spectators are affected by all that stuff… Of ourse you’ll say ‘All physics is perception’, won’t you?” …
I angrily pull off my socks, see the 12-for-2.99 crackerjack fabric has left lumps of damp black lint, very much like dirt, between my toes. “Imagine!” I exclaim, “Some even think there’s a fixed performance ‘language’. As if contemporary dance performance is some sort of as-yet unexplored Kabuki continent”! Yanking the quilt over my head, using a harsh if muffled stage whisper, I continue, “When all is said and done, Baby, these self-regarding dance performance creators think pretty much like the morality police: getting naked means getting naked! Getting naked is shocking! Off with your heads!” I am going to erupt with a “Tinkers, the lot!” content myself with a “Bah” when I catch the lightly snoring Karine out of the corner of my eye… Having vocalized my discontents, I decide instead to follow her into the gentling arms of Morpheus.
“Portrait” by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Maxime Le BlancThe next day, Rebecca Journo’s Portrait (2023) performance piece hushed my tirading mouth.
She and her collaborators in her troupe Collectif La Pieuvre, at least, measure the effects of suddenness, sound, stillness and movement on spectators; what they measure they measure out with skill and judgment. They bring spectators along both with Journo’s narrative intention but also into the performance experience – we not only get her point, the experience of her piece gets us into new imaginative space.
The rapidity with which her combination of psychological noos, traditional stagecraft and visual choreography had me turning my mind toward the scary flimsiness of identity and the emptiness of image quite amazed me. There’s practically no run up to it. You sit down and, bang!, you’re in Portrait’s happening, experiencing through the contents of your own imagination.
Journo writes that Portrait is a study of “going from image to movement, emptying then filling the form,” like Cindy Sherman or the genius-and-young-suicide Francesca Woodman have done by creating “selfies” that point away from “self” to “portrait”, “image” or “pose”: Who’s there? Who are you? Who am I? Is there someone there?
Journo shows what she means with a stage-occupying figure, drawn, it seems, from Modigliani’s 1918 Portrait of the artist’s wife – an intriguing image that expresses Modigliani’s affective perception and of which nothing remains of Jeanne Hébuterne, the wife in question. I’m assuming the link between Hébuterne and the portrait because Journo and her team use the portrait extensively in their promotion and because it hitches onto real stories into the performance line: in life, Hébuterne threw herself out of a window and died on 25 January 1920, the day after Modigliani’s death.
However, the figure on the stage as figure is entirely sufficient as placed in the set and used in the scene is more than adequate to the performance. It occupies one of a row of three metal chairs slightly left of center. It, the chairs and the sound inhabit a maze of black, ceiling-to-floor sharp-angular-cut curtains and a right-front-stage “cabinet of visual commentary” which one sees is equipped with curiously heavy objects, including, for instance, a reverse magnifying glass. The stage is framed against white, contrast, light; scenarized lighting, with a yellowish, old-fashioned bulb tint is used for performers; acoustic space is filled by occasional sounds of what makes me think of creaking metal swings in a lonely playground and the irritating ruckus of scratchy-crashing electromechanical interference.
“Portrait” by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La Pieuvre, BraslesPerformers suddenly appear and disappear in this unsettling maze of sharp straight angles, dark and light, creaks and scratchy squawk. They use a moonwalk-style that exaggerates and speeds up the top-front-back-bottom contrast and lends performers a certain slinky lizard-like visual that makes me think of Bram Stoker’s women vampires in his Dracula novel – the book attributes slithering to the count but my memory to his women. It seems to me then that the Portraitperformers, like Stoker’s women are pure pose, images of what isn’t seen or reproductions of what they believe others see; a vampire casts no shadow and has no reflection.
Who are Portrait’s performers/Dracula’s women? Stoker portrays his women as appetites – as reflexes. My thoughts on Journo’s cues can take things farther: people as performers as performances; in the end, they seem not much more than suitable simpers to show around. Identity not only depends on the purposes of a beholder, it may be nothing more than an echo of those purposes, an endless performance by an identity that is not more substantial than “performer”, an endless loop of selfies.
But it’s the connections not the intentions that are the genius in Rebecca Journo’s piece. Though she cannot, could not, know that I will frame Portrait with my memories of reading Dracula, she does know how to use her craft to push me in a particular emotional direction: recalling especially the emotions raised by chapter three of Stoker’s scary book: the frightening void behind the “revealing” image.
So, I come away from Journo’s Portrait as I came away from Dracula – deeply unsettled by all this identity stuff. Thinking, maybe the evil of Tik Tok’s “AI-enhanced” portraits is not so much imposing an unachievable identity on a fragile self as revealing there isn’t much more to that fragile self than an AI-enhanced selfie. And the “AI” is no such thing, to boot. It seems to me that realizing this is a lot more likely to send me jumping out of upper-story window than not having the price of a nose-job.
Rebecca Journo and her collaborators in the troupe Collectif La Pieuvre presented Portrait for the first time in Paris during the Faits d’Hiver 2023 program. On 9 February 2023, I saw it at Atelier de Paris/CDCN as staged and performed by Rebecca Journo herself, Véronique Lemonnier, Vera Gorbatcheva and Lauren Lecrique, wearing costumes by Coline Ploquin, on a set put together by Rebecca Journo and Guillemine Burin des Roziers, with sound by Mathieu Bonnafous and lighting and other effects by Jules Bourret.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
