I take the title Instantly Forever a couple of ways. Instantly is forever. Forever is an instant. I can reformulate that as I might in my philosophical cups: I never step into the same river twice; everything, including self, flows. Line and period. Particle. Wave. In my ordinary way of framing everyday action, I put “Instantly Forever” something like this: the present moment is all the feeling, experience and events + myself of the past.
In an ordinary way, I reckon, “Instantly Forever” describes Thomas Caley and Petter Jacobsson’s meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine back in 2011. They came to Nancy in the wake of Didier Deschamps’ very successful mandate there; Deschamps was going on to successfully lead the Théâtre national de Chaillot (National Dance Theater, ‘Chaillot’), which he did until just three years ago, when he was replaced by Rachid Ouramdane, now running Chaillot.
In addition to planning their future inside somebody else’s great professional success, the couple stepped into France’s sociocultural reality: “You can’t just fire everybody and stamp your name on things because the law won’t let you,” notes Caley. “You just can’t start over. So you have to work with memory ([memory:] what has been done and thought and felt)”.
To begin talks with the former director’s successful troupe, Jacobsson and Caley brought the popular choreographer, (working) dancer and interdisciplinary artist La Ribot to Nancy.
“She asked everybody their opinion. There was some turnover, of course, but [from La Ribot’s intervention] we had our basic group.”
There is something of “Instantly Forever” in La Ribot, too. “[La Ribot’s] solo and collective performances, installations, films and videos are the many facets of a practice”, says her website, “that constantly focuses on the rights of the body”. That means, I think, from having seen the multidisciplinary artist’s choreographic work, that she has no truck with the destructive body-stressing that a lot of classical and modern dance performance practice has associated with dance-excellence and a lot to do with the body. Since bodies have different tolerance levels, La Ribot’s practice implies a wider space for individual expression in group performance. I’ve already argued that, as spectator, the diversity of individual expression within a troupe performance is the outstanding characteristic of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine (Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: how to choreograph availability).
If the meeting with the Ballet de Lorraine was a line and a period, a work in memory and an affirmation of a choice in dance performance practice, in an ordinary way, Caley’s and Jacobsson’s past experience is also “Instantly Forever”.
The couple came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s – they met each other in Manhattan in 1994, with Caley just a few years into a high-level dance performance career and Jacobsson moving from prestige dance to doing his own performance and choreography thing. They frequented Mother and Bar Room 432, where new spectrum was being added to the culture.
In the post-Stonewall, punker, world, politics and arts of community – especially queer – were tweaking out new spaces for dance and performance, visual arts (integrating audio-visual technologies into live performance, deejaying and public participation formats, for example) and the limits of the acceptable imagination. These came together with undertakings such as Clit Club, MEAT, Jackie 60, Martha@Mother and Click + Drag.
Jacobsson and Caley did choreography for Martha@Mother, Richard Move’s Martha Graham love and deconstruction dance performance.
When invited to Stockholm to direct the Royal Swedish Ballet of Stockholm in 1999, Jacobsson and Caley decided to use the Ballet, along with the Royal Opera and its Orchestra, and outside artists to both blur the lines between performance and non-performance space, public- and citizen-space and bring together insiders and outsiders, spectators and performers with two huge (and publically and critically acclaimed) happenings in the Royal Opera House. Without even talking about the science and philosophy behind it, I think that it can be argued that, in those days, all that was new – as if a guerilla theater had recruited Everyman to dance a conceptual Swan Lake by Tracey Emin. It worked for the public, too.
So, success feeds success. When they set up their own company after 2001, Caley and Jacobsson were especially eager, they say, to “push the lines between norms” with their own work. Titles such as Unknown partner, Flux, No mans land – no lands man and The nearest nearness represent their search, I would say, to interpenetrate “instantly” and “forever”.
And in Stockholm, at the beginning of the 21st century, Caley and Jacobsson agree, they were trying to continue, as they say, pushing the lines between norms or, as I put it, interpenetrating instantly and forever, the period and the line, the past and the present, dance and performance: Untitled Partner #3, Performing performing, Rêlache (“Let go”or “Free day”),Timetable, Armide (viz., Lully’s 1686 opera-ballet), Record of ancient things, L’envers (“Reverse”, “Upside down”, “Behind”), Revue Moderne, For Four Walls, Discofoot (“Disco(dancing)+foot(ball”), Haendel with care, Air-condition and Mesdames et Messieurs…
Instantly, thus, Forever.
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I talked to Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley about their work so far in Paris in January 2024.
Spring & Summer 2024, Ballet de Lorraine: “A Folia” (“Folly”), the new creation by Marco da Silva Ferreira will premier with Petter Jacobsson’s and Thomas Caley’s “Instantly Forever”. The couple’s last Spring and Summer in Nancy also includes Ayelen Parolin’s new creation, “Malón”. Other Nancy-grown creations for the season include “Static Shot” by Maud Le Pladec, created for Ballet de Lorraine in 2020 along with Michele di Stefano’s “Danses Atmosphériques”, 2022 and Caley and Jacobsson’s “Discofoot”. Other Ballet de Lorraine productions include works such as Trisha Brown’s “Twelve-ton Rose” and three Merce Cunningham pieces, “Sounddance”, CRWDSPCR”, “RainForest”. Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot” will be the final production in July. Le Pladec succeeds Jacobsson and Caley as director of the Ballet de Lorraine.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
