Emanticipation, a laboratory
Performance from 17 Mar to 22 Mar 2014
10 years and 10 months ago
More than a space for residencies or exhibitions, Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette proposes itself as a situation. It’s an organic space that allows creativity itself to grow with the coming together of other disciplines, other manners of thought.
Resolutely oriented towards the living, we wanted, through the Anticipation programme, to reflect on the production of performance works.
COMPAGNIE MUA, UNDER THE DIRECTION OF EMMANUELLE HUYNH
The choreographic laboratory “Emanticipation” was born as a result of a discussion with the choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh about the challenges of Lafayette Anticipations, in particular the question of creative work, at the heart of a previous intervention entitled Hourvari, conceived for the reopening of the Centre Pompidou in 2001. Can creation be the fruit of collective work? Can the conditions for invitations and welcoming be thought out so that strong artistic singularities align? Can dance be a grounds for dialogue for art, philosophy, sonic poetry and architecture? So many questions for the young artists and performers, most of them from the “essayists” of the CNDC (National Centre for Contemporary Dance) in Angers, run by Emmanuelle Huynh until 2012.
Over a week, six performers and artists occupied the ground floor of our building making it into a forum. Their presence, which concluded with two evenings of performative experiments, a public laboratory that put the notion of exchange itself, the porousness of intelligences, of common desires but also collective doubt into perspective. With them, Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette not only opened itself to a new generation of creators, but was able to underline its commitment to the arts of dance and performance which, today, occupy a dominant place at the heart of art spaces.
"EMANTICIPATION, A LABORATORY"
After Fujiwara the curtain fell. The cold virginity of a falsely abandoned building returned to the ground floor of 9 rue du Plâtre, after months as prey to all kinds of metamorphoses.
Several wooden planks where raised to welcome the first work meeting of “Emanticipation”, a laboratory. Anna Gaïotti, Anne-Lise Le Gac, Volmir Cordeiro and Richard John Jones met one Sunday evening in March, in the company of the performer Pascal Quéneau. Still missing were Katerina S. Andreou and, of course, Emmanuelle Huynh. It was under her direction, from 2004 to 2012 that certain people followed the “Essai” course, a programme for choreographic authors at the National Centre for Contemporary Dance in Angers, where an enlarged conception of dance is applied.
Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette wanted not only to extend the reflection of Emmanuelle Huynh, but also to offer certain of her former students, as well as their guests, a frame for work and production. Together, they questioned the collective nature of performance work, its processes and its conventions. Over the course of a week we saw these artists, who have made movement their profession, stop to dialogue with each other. All their itineraries, interrupted in the exercise of the workshop, suddenly converged. Lafayette Anticipations became their focal point. The emancipated ones laid down on their sides. We saw them attempt to converse as a chorus, mouths and ears open at once, intercutting one with the other in a challenge launched by Richard John Jones based on an exercise imagined by Gertrude Stein. Can one speak and listen simultaneously? Impoliteness, at the centre of the question of a-sociability, is thus posed. The group wanted to invent a desire, to save its collective skin, to make each member shuck off their own body and melt into a social body.
The first exchange foreshadowed no particular result. It was necessary to ceaselessly watch the questions, the reversals, the repetitions and the exhaustion of orality to witness the approaching tipping over from text to action, as Paul Ricœur would have said. For three days, the company received guests - or “emanticipators” to help them with this task: Anna Colin, the Associate Curator of Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Anne-James Chaton, writer-performer, Judith Wambacq, philosopher, Benjamin Loiseau, architect, Maurizio Lazzarato, another philosopher, art critic Guy Tortosa and the researcher Pauline Le Boulba. All practiced a “somaieutic” on the laboratory artists: the art of giving birth to the mind so that it may give birth to the body.
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory #1
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory, from March 17th to 22nd 2014 under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Emanticipation, a laboratory #2
