A Paris live performance festival smooths out culture conflicts, supports creative endeavor, and helps live dance and performance lovers get their heads around the scene.
When wandering to and from, having forgotten both paperback and Mp3, I generally spend some time puzzling the words written on the subway walls. Sometimes, too, I find myself in what you might call a Mene, mene, tekel, parsin situation – and have, over the years, been called to prophecy. One of these situations was the transport agency’s “Paris Patchwork” marketing campaign, which against all sense and reason, seemed to preen itself on its “patchwork-ness” and vaunt the “hodgepodge-ness” of its services.
Call me “Daniel.”
Here’s the interpretation.
“Patchwork”, applies, and is a virtue, only when it comes to dance, dance performance or performance. And then, while many in other fields may try, only Creative Endeavor in live performance may, proudly, “hodgepodge”, or be “hodgepodge”.
Forcement, therefore, “patchwork” written on the subway wall is a sign we are talking of Paris dance & performance, not of Paris transport. This comes to me from above.
Forcement, therefore, the Word must be “festival” when it comes to dance performance “patchworks”, and or “hodgepodging”, in Paris. This comes to me from beyond.
It is an evidence, then, that a Paris live performance festival patches up then smooths out geographical, historical and culture hodgepodges, supports creative endeavors at home, in Europe and beyond, carries forward culture policy and, we can suppose, uses limited marketing resources more effectively than might otherwise be true.
Since each festival focuses on a different aspect of French and European creative ventures, aligning to a festival is also a way for live dance and performance lovers to get their heads around the scene and its venues – the interesting fund of theaters and culture centers to be found across the city and region.
‘Though they are certainly not the only live performance festivals – at institutional venues such as La Villette or Théâtre Monfort doing circus, for instance – Festival d’automne & Festival Kalypso, Faits d’hiver & Rencontres internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis do embody all the principles that make a Paris festival a good tool for organizing creative patchwork and negotiating esthetic hodgepodge.
Festival d’automne covers the spectrum of live music and live or visual performance (including classical dance or ballet performance), complementing more tightly-focused dance-performance festivals such as the hip-hop-oriented Festival Kalypso. While Festival d’automne, founded in 1972 and a post-1968 institution par excellence, explicitly sees its job as bringing together the hodgepodge of contemporary and classical cultural endeavor, Kalypso is de facto both a unifier in its domain and a formalizer-integrator of popular culture, bringing different types of hip-hop- performance – this means quality locally-developed but global-inspired popular culture – to the whole region. Since blending contemporary and classical culture doesn’t only involve bringing “break-dancer” Anne Nguyen or “hip-hop artist” Jann Gallois to the Palais de Chaillot, Kalypso de facto has also done a lot of the grunt-work over the five years of its existence.
Festival d’automne and Kalypso run across the whole Paris region, bringing together contrasting venues and places. As well as well-known intramuros venues, Festival d’automne links together classy marginal and suburban places (as well as their offerings): the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson at the legendary Cartoucherie in the east, Maison des arts de Créteil (Mac Créteil), seat of Festival Kalypso in the south, and strongly autonomous western places such as Nanterre-Amandiers theater and, to the north, places such as Centre dramatique nationale d’Aubervilliers. In contrast, if Kalypso compasses Paris, it does so (with two intramuros venues) with a tight ring of near-suburbs.
Festival d’automne and Festival Kalypso run from late September into December or January. To keep track of programs, subscribe to the newsletters for Festival d’automne or the Maison des arts de Créteil (Mac Créteil) by clicking the above links.
Beginning in January and continuing on into March, Faits d’hiver, like Kalypso, has a particular focus. Performances focus on creative development and innovative performance-for-its-own-sake by start-up, maturing and matured and less mainstream acteurs. Faits is just a small part of a larger performance-innovation-development effort. For instance, a principal instigator of Faits d’Hiver, Paris Réseau Danse (associating Atelier de Paris, L’Etoile du nord, micadanses-ADDP, and Studio Le Regard du Cygne, were also associated with performance initiatives such as Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s 1000 sessions of “Une minute de danse par jour." Vadori-Gauthier, also with the Réseau’s sponsorship, followed on the creation of her online dance-database archive, with the publication of “Danser Résister”, a hard copy collection of one-minute dances. So, if you’d like a glimpse of what dance-, “gesture”- oriented performance developments folks are thinking about, Faits d’Hiver performances are a good place to start.
With Festival d’automne, Rencontres chorégraphiques has a 1968 legacy mission to carry forward promotion of contemporary dance and dance performance, which it does admirably from a European perspective. From 16 May to 16 June, Rencontres will feature, among others, well-regarded performers such as Belgian Lisbeth Gruwez (who wonderfully danced Bob Dylan last year) presenting her first collective choreography (she will not be dancing), “The Sea Within”; Northern Ireland’s Oona Doherty, who captured attention on both sides of the Atlantic last year with the first episode of her performance "Hard to be Soft", “Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise”, doing the second episode, "A Belfast Prayer”; and France’s Matthieu Barbin doing “Totemic Studies” – conceptually looking into the anthropologic side of performance and gesture.
In the image of Festival d’automne and Kalypso, both Faits d’Hiver and Rencontres internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis are nomades, moving from venue to venue, but within more limited areas. We might say Faits creates a sort of Vatican City of performance development, radiating from the former national dance center in the Marais and not further south than the Générateur in Gentilly, while Rencontres occupies the Castel Sant’Angelo of radical-dance performance with venues very nearly 100% in the so-called “poor, immigrant” Seine-Saint-Denis department.
Shall we dance?