Ultreïa: Yonder! Over there! [Latin: ultra: “beyond/yon” et eia, “that-there”]. Since the medieval period, greeting used among pilgrims on the Chemin de Saint Jacques/ Jakobsweg/Way of Saint Jacques
Groupe SUZANNE says in its note to their dance-performance TO LIFE that the beauty of a body is revealed by well-thought-through, familiar and simple movement. And in TO LIFE, SUZANNE does just that. They say they’re doing it to resist a hard world and strengthen a better one. In doing it, the group just mostly walks in shadows, conjures, shares real-deal dance: unique space, time and Imagination.
With the valor of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, my 20th-century mother walked as determinedly as the 19th-century Elizabeth Bennett and her less perfect sisters. Ma might stumble but she never fell. She confessed that, taking the night air, she once ran into a UFO. She convinced me, though she herself remained puzzled by the encounter, no doubt for questions of faith. His hands behind his back, eyes skywardcast, my father, in snow, sleet or rain, summer and winter, very often nipped out “for ice cream”. Appearing suddenly with a certain imperious air, the assurance of an accomplished child-stealer, dad took, unawares-like, the idlest and most exposed, often my little sister or me, as company – Trace, he might say, only Velikovsky’s theory of the origins of Venus really explains the topsoil around here and point toward the sandy bottom of a ditch. Ice cream easily became a meal, a new sweater or a soldering iron.
Swigging cider or eggnog from a jug, imagining life in other, better, universes, my late brother Peter and I thought nothing of strolling the starry sub-zero deadness of Upstate New York’s country lanes. I walkedabout Paris with my son in his ages of colic and teeth, walked out with him for ice cream – he mostly still prefers pomegranate squash. The other day, a well-to-do Paris lady explained to me that she mostly walks. As we twisted back for one of those bye-byebye-bye waves as we left each other and ‘though it’s pointless, I immediately fell in love with her.
*”TO LIFE” was a work-in-progress in 2023. My “top note” for the performance reads: “… Space/sight creates movement … A very carefully-thought space: six dancers walk, as they walk, evolve: into a hug here, join hands there, walk abreast or lead… with light as for a movie, cf. Stalker from Andrei Tarkovsky: propos: normal laws of physics do not apply in a ‘Zone’ inhabited by a room where all desire gets real… Music accompanies…”.
In April 2025, TO LIFE walks forward (mostly). The six(?) performers move Indian file, sometimes (maybe mostly?) turning their heads and extending their hands (mostly) to verify (or just see) if there is somebody behind or (and) to reach out (sometimes or not) to the person. The pace is slow. Indian file turns (sometimes) into (mostly) fleeting sides-by-sides and into (mostly) couples but a body can think of threesomes and quadruplexes and pentagrams and hexagrams or visualize open lattices. But mostly it doesn’t come to stops and stays.
Why isn’t TO LIFE a treadmill? Because these SUZANNE (mostly) go forward but (sometimes) falter too – even seem to stop or turn. Actual faltering or touching dilates (or does something to) space time (I think). But space time something (mostly) doesn’t stop, as far as I’ve been able to learn, life’s Indian file. In Indian file, no matter how many ranks SUZANNE may be in, there seems no expectative, they have only the way ahead. Keep on trucking. (Maybe because) there is plenty of interstice, plenty of space to slip into.
At or near the very end, two (maybe more) people, I think, meet, embrace, before the curtain comes down.
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I saw Groupe SUZANNE‘s “TO LIFE”, conceived, written and choreographed by Lorenz Jack Chaillat-Cavaillé, Julien Chaudet, Julien Deransy and Eurydice Gougeon-Marinewith performers including the choreographers and Mélina Ferné, Axelle Lerouge, Thiago Menezes and Anne Quaderi,with Marie-France Charles, at L’Etoile du Nord on 3 April 2025. Costuming was done by SUZANNE, music handled by Romain Poirier, songs composed by Marina Sangrà, lighting done by Jérôme Baudoinand communications and production handled by Lucie Mariotto. are developing a new dance performance piece scheduled for 2026. *I first saw TO LIFE as a work-in-progress during l’Etoile du Nord’s “Open Space” presentations of new work on 20 January 2023.