Not dragons snaking through the northern skies, exactly, but there are signs and portents of a rich pre-Summer dance and performance offering to mull over during the long vacation. For instance, the programs for June Events at the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson, Rencontres choégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019 and Occupation 3 at Théâtre de la Bastille and … the 10e Biennale internationale des arts de la marionnette – “Tenth International marionnette festival”.
What threads dance, performance and puppetry (theater of objects) on the same necklace is object: subject as object, object as subject, the thing outside and the thing inside, myself and the material world. Chekhov says that if you bring a pistol on stage, you have to eventually stop talking and use the damned thing. Dance, performance and puppetry do just that, using movement to explore me-here and this-there.
Théâtre de la Bastille in joint production with Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson has recently presented a strong contemporary dance-performance offer. Expressionist movement pieces – including Hard to be soft, Oona Doherty’s gritty-real evocation of the emotional rigidity behind Northern Ireland’s “ troubles”, Shira Eviatar’s Body Roots/rising, recalling Israel’s multicultural heritage through a family portrait and Arab dance, Simon Mayer’s Sunbengsitting, a parody of (Austrian) folk dance and Nina Santes’
plunge into archaic consciousness (Santes’ Hymen hymne is a happening as happenings should have been) – were themed around personal identity. Bastille continues what is essentially a performance program through June with “Occupation 3”, featuring creator Nathalie Béasse, essentially performance pieces done through the tradition of theater (rather than dance) that fold together the artist’s past, present and future with herself, her audience, performers and associated light and sound creators.
Since I personally like the dance pieces of so many of the creators, it may only be prejudice, but Rencontres chorégraphiques 2019 seems stronger this year than previously in what I have to call “straight” dance-performance – these days only a hip-hop billing guarantees an hour of hot shimmy. Choreographers and dance performers of the quality of Radhouane El Meddeb, Ballet Cullberg with Eleanor Bauer, the choreography-music team Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, Daniel Linehan, Daniel Larrieu and David Wampach grace the festival’s program. So I reckon this year it is dance – focus, roughly, on: body, rhythm, sensibility – rather than performance that has carried the day for the successor to feu Jaque Chaurand’s avant garde Le Ballet pour demain.
Atelier de Paris always focuses on new ideas and or new work, a focus that is especially obvious in its annual June Events festival. A prelude in early May features Prononcer FenanOQ, a work on the corporality and culture of French letters by Cécile Proust, a
choreographer known for her work on gender, and Pierre Fourny, an old-school ranter poet who works on the forms of letters along with the sounds associated with them. The well-known performance choreographer Joanne Leighton, whose repertoire includes a focus on the relational qualities of ordinary movement – for instance, I am sitting in a room or Songlines – closes her residence on the first day of the festival with Walk #3 (starting in four different places in Paris) and the in-situ piece 9000 steps.
Nina Santes is 2019-20 Atelier associate and I expect her taste for happening will take over from Leighton’s movement contemplations.
The June Events program proper opens with hip-hop-fusion choreographer Amala Dianor’s Man Rec (Wolof for “Just me”), followed by new pieces in premier by performers such as Aina Alegre, working on body cultures, Vincent Thomasset, developing staged production from in situ performance and Fouad Boussouf (a choreographer jointly featured with Printemps de la danse arabe#1 and the Institut du monde arabe).
Nina Santes opens her residence the first weekend of the two-week festival with an all-night performed-happening of “transgressive fictions”: works-in progress, dance and performance pieces, sacralization through ritual, a supper-banquet and concerts. Her work is complemented by the intellectual contributions of quality-performance quantities such as Ashley Chen and new performance by creators such as Antonia Baehr & Latifa Laâbissi and Margot Dorleans.
June 2019 closes with works by the renowned choreographer dance-performers Saburo Teshigawara and Thomas Hauert and the CCN – Ballet de Lorraine and a free dance party.