Until I saw Jeanne Brouaye’s newest performance, (M)other, I’d been really stumped by the raw power of her performances, especially, but also the power of performance generally.
I’ve got it. At least I think so. At least partly. Eureka.
Every one of Brouaye’s performance’s, at least, has left me in one way or another de-conditioned, in a sort of prodromal buzz state.
Walking away from (M)other, a little accusingly, a little shaken, a little sheepish, I say to Karine, “Why do we live in houses? I mean, it’s a choice.” Karine nods, more than usually thoughtful.
I first ran into Brouaye’s work in 2022 at one of Etoile du Nord‘s dance and theater performance WIP shows-and-tells, a piece called Foghorn – the notes say, “… Surrounded by a Kapla ‘block-housing’ landscape, two entities tangled up in wool yarn are center stage…”. I note, “foghorn” is defined as a “horn of fog” as in “horn of plenty”, not as a warning sound in the fog – something that entirely misleads unless it’s read before the show. And I never do; a show has to stand naked of intentions before spectators, swing or not at view.
Foghorn, I thought, impressed me with its “busy-ness with fate-like characteristics…” Whatever that means. But it impressed me.
A few months later, at Atelier de Paris, I saw her Ce qu’il reste à faire et là où nous en sommes ([?] “What remains to do and just exactly where we are with it”) a title that addresses me, personally. “Solo”, say the notes, Jeanne Brouaye “… builds a plastic and sound installation that recalls [the/a] shelter with long planks of wood, inner tubes and a pedal”. Fascinating to watch her build what remains to do and just exactly where we are with it.
“Somehow”, say my notes, “The stuff takes over from her hands. She knows it”.
In November of the same year, also at the Atelier de Paris, the note says that living space continues to be Brouaye’s privileged theme in A voix et à mains nues (“Bare voices and bare hands”). The piece strikes me, my notes say, for people bringing together stuff and stuff over taking people. It opens on bales of hay. The smell perfumes, embaume, the French word is, the air. But that isn’t why the hay bales stick in my mind. Neither is it a play on childhood memories from the farm. Even if I can’t identify why, it is important to my experience of the piece that the hay bales stick in my mind. There are hi-viz vests.
A friendly female voice lays out a narrative which doesn’t necessarily describe what happens next but which nevertheless structures an expectation – what expectation, I can’t say. Three young women climb out from somewhere and begin building. I’m a big builder in my hours, too. But it doesn’t have to do with spectator experience, either.
After a bit, one woman sings a capella. A little flat. Then the three take three microphones and make rythmic breath, pump, click rhythm that becomes the background for assiduous building that gets finished, undone, rethought… more singing and new music… It peters… But not out.
A voix et à mains nues positively carries me away. But where to?
As I’m walking off from (M)other muttering to my compagne about the choice to live in houses rather than some alternate solution (which I am not as yet capable of compassing), it comes to me that the reason Jeanne Brouaye’s work has so strong an effect is that it harnesses the power of the diorama.
Diorama: the light and shadow of scattered clouds changing the aspect of the country it is passing over. Although the country remains the same, it reveals within it a landscape. Associated with the development of photography and film (Louis Daguerre and Charles Bouton coined the term), a diorama shows that it is the eye that values different things in different ways as light and shadow are spread within its capture: a “photograph”. It also shows that the eye gives more attention to things that move than to things that don’t. Controlling the flow of light can make things seem to move as well as suggest proximities and colors: “cinematograph” or “movie”.
Making photos and movies obscures another key observation to be drawn from a diorama: a huge amount of complex and accessible information can be packed into visualization: “one picture is worth” thousands upon thousands of different and even contradictory events, thoughts, images, emotion, allusions, references, ideas, symbols and thoughts. The visual grammar highlighted by the diorama facilitates the simultaneity of perceptions and emotions that makes un-narrative experience such as dance so profoundly satisfying.
A diorama experience from childhood sticks in my mind. In a little hollow made of painted plaster, a blue crick, stony-earthy-color outcroppings, tufts of dead grass and some willowy papier-mâché-augmented dry bushes and trees and, within this, an “Indian family”: a yaller-skinned brave and squaw with a papoose and reed basket with some sort of berries and stuff in it.
Bathed in a mellow – thoughtful – light. Attractive.
A single glance made me understand why a man, a woman and a baby were instead an “Indian” family: a brave, a squaw and a papoose. Also, why instead.
In one fell tableau, these half-naked yaller folk in Bakelite in a woodsy setting in an instant limned the whole wild tangle of the Enterprise White Man I was apprenticed to.
And though I wouldn’t know it to say it for years to come, the visualization summed up the anti-enlightenment ideology behind New World race-slavery (black, yaller, white/unfree, freer, free), the Noble Savage, Natty Bumppo’s natural wisdom, James Fenimore Cooper’s petit-bourgeois adventurism, Nathanael Hawthorne’s buck-twisted alienation and naked self-interest (cf. MAGA’s Steve Bannon), the unreadable yet classic prose of the Leatherstocking Tales, Clash-of-Civilizationalism and… Jumping Jesus Jim! Before that diorama, my 10-year-old grokked the essential of all in a squint: “Ideals are killed off because they are already dead”. That’s the way it is. Q.E.D.
Reading Brouaye’s (M)other (or Foghorn, Ce qu’il reste à faire et là où nous en sommes or A voix et à mains nues) or, indeed, other performances by other creators, as a diorama means making some small adjustments in where a spectator focuses.
In the nature of things, a performance seems to roll out over time, so it seems natural to look at it as a sequence of events. But instead of “what comes next”, a spectator can choose to watch for emerging “landscapes”: as they would in looking at an abstract painting or created object or in taking notes, give space to different, apparently unrelated “signifying groups” – feelings, images, thoughts, observations. Rather than look for ways the signifying groups come next in time, one after the other, let them coalesce un-narratively, without evoking links and connections, as in free-association.
Next time I go to a performance, I will more pay even more attention than I already do to the opening stage, remember that it is a topography, a foundational arrangement.
But in (M)other, that initial arrangement was this, as far as I remember: dust, stones, wood thingamajigs, constructions, scarecrows or dummies, the dark and light, fasteners, hinges, performers, doing and shifting, LED screen advertisement for a nice little apartment for €900 euros/month + charges with a balcony but F on energy.
I played I Spy in the, as it were, light and dark, that washed over her topography: I spy the short mineral history of cement. I spy the sadly enraging story of Crystal who lives in a yurt only to lose custody of her kid.
I spy a flash of light, I spy plaster hands.
Witch dancing! Busy hands! I spy Witchery! Anthropology!
In the shadows, among the dust and thingamajigs, I am sure I spy Homo ergaster.
I spy slats of wood above!
Below, I spy the household – la maisonée. I spy some boiling lentils, some tugging in bodies, some grinding and some who live in cement boxes and have cell phones.
As I sat with my palms on my knee, the curtain closed. The bows finished.
Though I don’t quite know it yet, I’ve seen it all as if seeing through a new weird telescope. Inevitable is not.
Why live in a house? Is a house a home? Is a house a house?
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I saw “(M)other”, a performance for five persons, created by Jeanne Brouaye, in premier on 3 June at Atelier de Paris/CNDC as part of the June Events 2025 program, performed by the choreographer with Estelle Delcambre, Lucie Piot, Clément Carre, Harris Gkekas, a set and constructions by Margaux Hocquard, Marta Pelamatti, Mehdi Pinget, sound by David Guerra, lighting by Guillaume Pons, costuming by Camille Lamy and assistance for choreography and staging from Lou Viallon and Camille Louis.