Rituel N°5: La Mort by Émilie Rousset and Louise Hémon produced at the Atelier de Paris earlier this month drolely and elegantly highlights how commercial culture manages to spew up a honey-mouthed and optimistic “business of death”. It has a wonderful cast, too – Barbara Chanut, Mohamed El Mazzouji, Anaïs Gournay, Manon Hugny, Damoh Ikheteah, Tom Pezier, Arthur Rémi, Ophélie Ségala. Together, they deftly negotiate esthetic and useful multimedia into a quick stand-up theatrical style. Special kudos to a pale blonde enthusiast for humus-processing corpses (Manon Hugny) and to tubby-tummy Kevin’s pre-sales “aperitifs of death” (delivered by Tom Pezier).
Rituel 5 reminded me that a lot of well-known figures, with more or less laboriously managed hoopla, have lately been shuffling off the mortal coil.
I’m particularly thinking here of the late Queen Elizabeth II, celebrated for discretely holding her nose and dispensing charity with cypher-like poise! All for nearly three-quarters of a century! Duty, it’s called. The woman’s remains enjoyed a seemingly infinite state-subsidized swan song: “Je meurrss, je meurrrrssss, je meurrrrrrrrssssss”. Cats! Or, rather, Corgis!
It’s a shame that funerals like the defunct British queen’s suck up so much otherwise obviously available social oxygen, leaving us all that much more stupid.
The distraction of the famous funeral makes it hard to remember that the dead do contribute more than fat fees for thepompes funèbres and the lawyers. That’s because, in a certain way, Rituel N° 5’s pale-haired humus-fanatic has it right. The dead are destined for the humus bin. That is, once dead, our contribution is freed up to evolve autonomously.
Settling back on my blood-red Recamier, turning my eyes skyward, I descry three types of dead: empty dead, personal dead and spiral or Fibonacci dead.
If the UK’s late queen has symbolized poised nose-holding these many years, dead, she’s as empty as Wednesday evening’s rubbish barrel. Dead, public projections seek more lively targets, such as her boy, Charles; although a very expensive one, absent the symbol, her husk, royal as may be, is a husk and she’s got a place among the empty dead.
The personal dead are just the opposite of the empty dead, who have been, essentially, public receptacles. The personal dead affect the matters around which one arranges one’s own life – I think of the personal dead as adding an un-calculable heft to a person’s skipping stone just at it smacks the water. Or as an analogy of entanglement, the phenomenon that lets two separate things be in the same place at the same time and very evidently different.
Among the recent personal dead, Françoise Dupuy, 97 years old, checked out in mid-September. She was, along with her husband, the still-living Dominique, teacher to and choreographer for many of France’s now-senior and influential choreographers and dancers. She’s buried in Père Lachaise, where all mourners slip into the lost funeral scene from Les 400 Coups for a time. Dupuy believed, I have been told, that dance exists to let a body be authentically themself.
A couple of months back I had the pleasure to interview Laurence Bertagnol about her open-to-all-comers “research” dance group. Laurence now runs the dance and music program at Conservatoire de danse et de musique Erik Satie Bagnolet, the place where Jaque Charaund developed France’s contemporary dance scene with his Ballets pour demain and Concours de Bagnolet. Françoise Dupuy taught Laurence Bertagnol to dance.
When Laurence and I met again at the opening of the Regard du Cygne’s Journée de Matrimoine celebration, her mouth twisted in a mild consternation, Laurence told me she was feeling Dupuy’s death. She explained that, although she had broken with her many years ago, Dupuy was her “other mother”, her “dance mother”. With a sigh as soft as a cat’s laugh, Laurence adds that she had always been fearful lest Dupuy and her birth mother should meet… She broke with Dupuy, because, she says, “I wanted to dance like me.”
In the way the “arms” of a galaxy define it as a galaxy distinct from a spray of stars, the spiral or Fibonacci dead link the vastly different into vast units. That’s why shapes and things in the universe describe as forms of infinite spirals or Fibonacci series.
I learned about this while – or, perhaps, because – my late brother and I were munching celery stalks in the kitchen at my folks’ one night. As I now know, certain dead among us also descry as spirals or Fibonacci series.
Just the day before getting the news about Françoise Dupuy from Laurence Bertagnol, I was also at the Regard du Cygne, to attend an homage to Laura Sheleen, of whom I had never heard. Laura Sheleen died not forgotten in 2021 under Covid lockdown in a far-suburban Ehpad –établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – a public old folks home.
I supposed that, like Françoise Dupuy, Laura Sheleen, who came to France after dancing with Martha Graham, was a teacher and choreographer, one of the personal dead for the pretty large crowd of people participating in the homage.
She is that, surely, for life-witnesses such as, among others who danced and explored the world of the mind with Sheleen, Amy Swanson, founder and recently-retired director of the Regard du Cygne or Viviane Thibaudier, a Jungian psychoanalyst or Anna Alexandre, a specialist in theater therapies and behavior psychology or, again, Jabrane Sebnat, a sufi dancer and a psychotherapist.
But, as I began to listen and then to read through the little front-back photocopied program, I realize that Sheleen was one of the spiral dead, one of those whose contribution describes the shapes of the world: a powerful advocate of and innovator in understanding the function of dance chez nous. Through dance, Sheleen worked with myth, masks, movement and space on the problem of individuation. Not forgetting Eve Alexandre’s excellent short films on the application and effect of Sheleen’s approach(es), professional-witnesses for her contribution were enthusiastic working psychiatrists, behavior, dance and theater therapists …
According to a German architect anthropologist who happened to be sitting next to me, Sheleen is especially known for her work on the role of space in “proprioception” – knowing where you are.
In an act of illuminating synchronicity, the remarkable choreographer and dancer Yasmine Hugonnet clarified this idea the next day in her new performance, La Peau de L’Espace (“The Skin of Space”), premiered at Lafayette Anticipations, 16 September. Hugonnet says, if I understand her, that proprioception is a feedback loop rather than a plug-in: you need space around to know where your body is but your perception creates and recreates that space. You can’t get it going by plugging in a model. In the same way that a water pump has to be primed with water, proprioception takes priming with movement, gesture and place. Sheleen’s contribution helps people on the autism spectrum or with behavior difficulties or psychoses find a better space in the world.
Happy trails all.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
