The more often I go to dance and performance events at the Etoile du nord, the more often I want to go to events at the Etoile du nord.
For one thing, the dance performance programs that include artist question times, such as the Open Space program, are always full with young people, which makes me hopeful for the future of live performance. For another, it’s informative and stimulating to see and hear about what artists think might or should be put forward and why and how it might work for spectators.
Performer choreographer Joachim Maudet’s effort to use ventriloquism in a new solo performance, called Kid#1, for instance, got me thinking about the real, physical and psychological effects of movement and stage tricks on people. The ventriloquism – relocation of sound from source – along with an underpinning narrative about schoolyard bullying, manages to evoke really strong anxiety in me (and also, apparently, in the 8- or 9-year-old kid in the seat next to me).
The ventriloquism charges the pathos of the narrative with a certain menace as well as strengthens visual dislocations: in costume (adult dressed as kid – psychic confusion?), in place (on the floor – a sidewalk?), in posture (sat-sprawl – drunk or deranged?) and in sound (in addition to portentous music, the ventriloquism disembodies a confused mumble bubbles above or behind the adult-kid-drunk – bipolar?). The effect of the voice dislocation on the scene is to point the spectator away from the narrative theme and strongly towards the character. The former is full of pathos – How awful! – but the latter is downright dangerous – Christ, I hope he’s not armed!
On the whole, this year’s Open Space program, at least from a spectator’s point of view, was much more visual or experiential than narrative.
For instance, Group Suzanne’s WIP To Life uses six people walking together alone and in different relations inside the light of a movie (especially referencing Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 classic, Stalker) in an experiment with (notions of) space in performance. Julien Rossin’s S’enembra explores the use of light in close-in body movement…. Nana Movemen’s evolving Jamais la fin looks mostly to the effect of repetitive movement on spectator visual experience, using what I think of as a “techno-quadrille” to “show the encounter of a masculine and feminine duo, mix them up and finally forget [that the two genders] exist”.
My favorite experiential-oriented WIP was Collectif La Ville en Feu’s Les Planètes. The collective – made up of performer choreographers Marius Barthaux, Thomas Bleton, Agathe De Wispelaere, Juliet Doucet, Jean Hostache, Louise Buléon Kayser, Giulia Dussollier, Myriam Jarmache, Simon Peretti and Garance Silve – has long been working Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into the fabric of urban landscape.
Many of the collective’s members are or have been students of Nadia Vadori Gauthier, the choreographer, notably, of the well-known Une Minute de Danse Par Jour. Vadori Gauthier’s Une minute, created as it was in the wake of the Charlie-Hebdo terrorist murder-spree, affirms the right of people to animate and enjoy the city and its space. Rite of Springperformances are much in the same vein: a claim to enjoyment and pleasure in our public space. In contrast, the Les Planètes creation seems less to animate and enjoy space than to shape it, using performance as a tool to re-imagine it.
The collective’s Open Space preview was a brisk and exciting taste of how the re-imagination might be done.
Without any warning, spectators are pushed outside and into a sort of exterior corridor between two fairly low-rise buildings. The ground space is crowded with shiny-leaf scritchy bushes, dry florist-style dirt and wood chips encroaching slabs of a concrete walkway, a notice board under a jiffy rain shelter. Above ground: a jumble of overhangs, metal struts and landings, catwalks, fixtures, chain-link accesses, intimations of roof-top equipment. It’s impossible to get a clear view.
The performers burst through up there, in the interstices. Spectators wriggle, stress and strain to see and hear as they jump and clamber, using the orchestral topography of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement suite with wordless chorus, as conceptual choreography and navigation.
They come slowly down. Spectators get out of their way. They conquer and carve out stages in the clutter and elbow-to-elbow bustle: fools and mad folk caper and roar, clump to make short, Planets-inspired drama and (a capella) sound and song. Fascinated, putty in their hands spectators try to follow them with our eyes, listen to what they can’t see… Just as they carve out stages from spectator space, they make them into stage hands and props.
Collectif la Ville en Feu’s ability to create and mold its performance space and master its spectators makes me think Les Planètes will be a different and wonderful experience of public art.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
