La Ménagerie de Verre performance studio, Laboratoire de création contemporaine – in the 11th arrondissement, just off the avenue Parmentier, about mid-way between rue de la Roquette and avenue de la République– is a legendary neighborhood institution. Until very recently it had a very human personality in Marie-Thérèse Allier, its founder and guiding spirit. That ended at the tippy end of March when Allier unexpectedly died, aged 91.
I say “unexpectedly died”, because, as with the invasion of Ukraine, despite the flagrant provocation, people of sense and sensibility just had trouble getting their heads around the very idea of her death. I was surprised myself when I heard of it – at the penultimate performance of the annual Spring program, Etrange Cargo 2022. Indeed, Le Monde newspaper reported that Allier was, quite literally, creatively engaged from her hospital room at the hour of her death – doing some last-minute consulting with staff at the opening of the day’s performance.
A dancer, not a choreographer, Marie-Thérèse Allier set up La Ménagerie as an artist’s residence and public stage for experimental creations and then kept it that way for almost forty years. Vincent Bouquet, writing in scèneweb.fr, a contemporary performance arts webzine, lists former residents whose work got a first staging at the studio and who have been both influential and popular into the present. They include, just as a sample of those you’re likely to have known earlier or heard about today, Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé, Daniel Larrieu and Angelin Preljocaj, Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Leroy, Mathilde Monnier, Christian Rizzo, Olivia Grandville, François Chaignaud, Rodrigo Garcia, Yves-Noël Genod, Vincent Macaigne and Théo Mercier.
But identifying Allier with her successful institution or her commitment to supporting successful creative contemporary dance-performance doesn’t represent her full story. More than commitment and practical ability, Allier had an instinct for dance performance that meant that she brought spectators toward what is intriguing in dance and performance. Not new, not experimental, intriguing.
From my experience as a spectator over the years, writing about dance or not, Allier seems always to have encouraged her creators to get at spectator imaginations, encouraged them to try for a sense of something that isn’t tied either to convention or radicality or originality. I look over those in the scèneweb.fr list and, among those I have experienced personally, it seems to me that that effort at something intriguing in dance is what characterizes them. Throughout Allier’s career getting at something intriguing often meant cherishing “queerness”, the only operative way, especially into the 2000s, to get a bit beyond the notions of convention, radicality and originality and all that guff.
So, at Marie-Thérèse Allier’s La Ménagerie, whether or not I liked or appreciated a piece, whether it connected with me or not, I mostly felt it managed to redeem itself in pointing me toward what I cannot or could not see or say. Emblematic of my feeling, I’m thinking now of Raimund Hoghe, who died in May 2021. Hoghe was a long-time Allier familiar, a Pina Bausch Tanztheater alumni and a wonderful dance-performance creator that I might not have even begun to understand were it not for the patience of a more perspicacious friend.
La Ménagerie’s An evening with Raimund Hoghe, Hommage à Raimund Hoghe par ses danseurs et proches collaborateurs says it all about Allier’s real contribution. Sitting there grumpily and trying to find fault, I managed not only to recognize Hoghe’s work style and manner as each of the dancers and collaborators involved honored a remarkable fellow in their movement. They brought me to feel, as a spectator, that I’d shared in the man’s essential sensibility and feeling. I first slipped into Hoghe’s perspective and then, tripped into a place where I could imagine myself not just as beyond words but as otherwise. Choosing and supporting creators willing and trying to do that, why that’s a real contribution.
So, thanks, Marie-Thérèse Allier, for enabling Raimund Hoghe and all those others, who, as Hoghe did, seek dance otherwise.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
