Monsieur Loyal commente
la ballerine s’évente
et pique la piste
en vrille
rouge banderille
(MC Gayffier)
– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through
The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.
I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).
Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.
So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.
The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.
Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.
At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.
I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.
I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.
Get on up. Hold on.
_______
Jarretière
Faire jouer
La puissance du gastrocnémien medical
Et l’agilité pianistique
Des orteils en fleur
– Play / Power of the calf / Pianistical lability / Blossoming toes
_______
Aigle agile
en recul devant
l’invisible
Il torée
Le vide
– From the invisible / retreat / Wrestle the air
_______
S(a)e(n)Volant
petite fille
fait tourbilloner sa jupe
joue à s’étourdir
et comme la toupie
s’exstasie
(ainsi s’évade la petite planète pensionnaire)
– girl / turns in her skirt, tornado / for pleasure / and ecstasy / like a top / (flies off the petty planet)
_______
Toupie
l’impensable anatomique :
discorde des articulations
contestations de la cambrure
lordose de l’antithèse
et négation des apophyses
– Le menu fretin vertébral
saisi dans la poèle
en atroce pliure
– unthinkable anatomy / undone articulations / over arch / tested curve red-hot / undiscovered bone / – bent just ready to break
_______
Légère confiance
poignet-pivot
Wikipédia dit :
« Un méchanisme est l’association
de plusieurs pièces liées entre elles
par des contacts physiques qui les rendent
totalement ou partiellement solidaires.
Le joint de Cardan permet la transmission
D’une rotation angulaire entre deux arbres dont
Les axes géométriques concourent en un même
– handle / Saying: / “A mechanism is an association / made of different linking parts / by body contact making them / partly whole or complete. / the universal coupler enables transmitting / rotations enabling racks to pinions / along a same sharpened geometry”