Talk

Carte blanche to Taos Bertrand's workshop

Sunday 17 Sep 2023 from 3pm to 4pm

Free entry

Free access, without registration

© Chloé Magdelaine

Choreographer Taos Bertrand is leading a workshop with students from the Beaux-Arts de Paris on the figure of the mermaid. Closing up five days of intensive work, the students will present the results of their workshop to the festival audience.

"sassy is a performance workshop looking at the marvellous creature of the mermaid, the infernal double of the celestial Muses, present in both popular and academic culture.

From Homer and Andersen to Walt Disney, Square Enix, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, Shygirl and Edgar Allan Poe, and from Ovid's "doctae Sirenes" to mythical tales of fluidity, otherness, the monstrous, trickery and death. They are called Ondine, Ariel, Leucosia, Aglaope or Lygia and are often associated with a disastrous fate, metamorphosing into stone or a stream. Orpheus and Ulysses plunge them into silence.

sassy is an invitation to read, interpret and rewrite, over the five days of the workshop, the endings that history has given to this chimerical and transhistorical figure. Through the body of each participant, we will compose other translations where notions of club culture, performance and mythological narrative can switch. To give them a new voice, mutations, strength, song and stridency. Under the sign of excess, rebirth and desire."

Taos Bertrand
Taos Bertrand is a dancer-performer and choreographer. Her work is motivated by questions of writing and materiality, prophecy and disorder, ghosts and avatars.

Her works include Orages (2015), which is rooted in her experience as a person born under X; Rafales (2017), an undulating piece that won the Fondation Beaumarchais-SACD writing grant; and Inside your bones (2019) with the Ars Nova instrumental ensemble. A Villa Kujoyama prizewinner in 2019, on her return from Japan she created a solo, Vestiges (2021), La Fin des Forêts (2022), a trio on another mythology of cruising, promettre (2022), a duet co-written with and at the invitation of Erwan Larcher for the Festival d'Avignon's Vive le sujet programme.

In 2023, she created brutal syntax, a piece commissioned by the Meltdown festival commissioned by Christine and the Queens, and took part in Adam Linder's new creation for the Museum of contemporary art of Sydney.

As a performer, she has worked with Olivier Dubois, Christine & the Queens, Adam Linder, Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, Valentin Noujaïm, Jean-Luc Verna, the collective (LA)HORDE, Koki Nakano...