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.
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.
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.
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.
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 6th”, “February 24th”, 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.
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
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
