What can dance do?
Jessica Teixeira’s Monga might make US Attorney General Pam Bondi shout “Off with his head!” and make a lunge for Dorothy’s ruby slippers. “Monga” is the Brazilian phrase for “monkey-woman”. And what sex is that, pray? Louise Vanneste‘s Mossy Eye Moor could certainly raise the short hairs on US Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ neck. Climate change is a myth and a damp and solemn moor can have nothing to say.
Presented back to back, Monga, around the experience a person other than one's self, and Mossy Eye Moor, around potential feelings in another species, might very well call up an ox-like bellow from the eternal Colonel Blimp down in the Mastodon Coffee Room at le club Old White Guys’. All three scenarios are entertaining.
That ox-bellow, those bristly hairs, that crazed lunge, dance is doing those. Dance can entertain, too, or at least provoke the stuff that brings on a snicker.
Most of all, though, what dance does is imagine and perform; the rest is consequence.
In Monga, Jessica Texeira takes on the historical character of a freak-show singer, playing, her note says, both “a body that looks and a body that acts“. That is, a mirror performance that is meant to make spectators be between the grotesque and the erotic of Monga. Anne Sauvage, director of Atelier de Paris and programmer for June Events 2025, notes that real, personal history such as Monga is especially a performance tour de force: the creative force of concentration (or artistic focus), choreography (arrangement) and body (movement).
And then, when the Pams and Rons and Blimps have moved on, “diversity” is just another way of saying “richness” – of imagination and in performance. Louise Vanneste’s Mossy Eye Moor is rich. It bets on imagination and performance. Five performers in their setting give entangled form to “Mossies”, a presence which arises from the connection of essentially “geological” phenomena. Like Jessica Texeira, Vanneste mobilizes the power of live performance (focus, arrangement, movement) but she also imagines the elements of her set (sound, light, matter, space, human and other species’ bodies, the visible and invisible) with equal existential weight. The sensibility sought for is a concert of difference, showing out the diversity of the connecting tissues of creation.
Diversity (or, as I think it should be expressed, “richness of imagination and in performance”), Anne Sauvage observes, does not have to be narrative, does not have to be literal, to nourish spectators and performers.
Richness has a through-time side that implies things like personal and professional change. As I noted in my earlier essay on may talk with her, Anne points out that Marie-Caroline Hominal’s move from solo performance to “ballet” (Her Numéro#0, Scene III) has its richness in unfolding a performance esthetic that happens as an artist progresses with their art.
There's the richness of exploring objectives. With Fragmented Shadows(2024), on the strength of her notes and video snippets, Wanjiru Kamuyu seems to have moved from performing stories with movement (Stepping through that door: "An Immigrant’s Story" by Wanjiru Kamuyu, 2022) to performing movement to go beyond stories.
There's the richness of persistent focus, too. Pierre Pontvianne says his performance là-SEXTET (“the-there-SEXTET”) ignites from a line from Georges Didi-Huberman’s Sentir le grisou (“Smell the odorless”): "Nothing makes for a better catastrophe than the apparent normality in passing time". I don’t know where SEXTET will take a spectator yet, but I do know that Pontvianne seems always trying to explore far into the Stein-ian theres in the there's he's spotted (Were it given to all to see into the heart of each! Pierre Pontvianne’s “Motifs”).
What can dance do? Make us rich!
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Other artists on the June Events 2025 program
Click on the name to find out more: Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, Mohamed Issaoui, Rebecca Journo, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Vânia Vaneau.