Artist's Statement
"Dance is for me an experimental frame in which I can think and practice, together with other people, a social and entangled subjectivity: I-as-part-of-we, I-through-we, I-in-we. This is not an independent 1st person perspective, but a 1st person singular that exists within and in relation to a 1st person plural. It exists within and in relation to multiple WEs. This is a self that is responsible for itself and for its environment(s), that takes responsibility for the context(s) it is a part of. It is also a self that is response-able to its context. It changes and is changed. Porosity is the main quality of its borders. Porous borders are its main material. These favor leaks between language and image, imagination and sensation, individuality and collectivity. Agency is enacted as we compose pathways across these thresholds.
I frame, host and animate situations in which dance is a lens through which we can experiment with and practice such an understanding of agency.
I devise and practice dance scores, that are to be danced by more than one person. A score is a formalized object that motorizes and frames a dance. It is is a conceptual hypothesis which may be tested, a chance to develop relational modes that may otherwise be overlooked. It is a fiction within which we can speculate. It is a generator of experience, and experience is a thought process. Devising frames of experience is devising frames for experimentation, bringing into play our knowledge, thoughts, sensations and desires in specific configurations. A score is a set of instructions, which may include words such as tasks or stories, tone and timing of voice, and which turn the dancers' attention to various elements of their activity. I choreograph by directing the dancers' or the audience's attention and by setting up principles for how to engage with oneself and with each other.
My scores generate choreographic models, social miniatures through which dancers practice a sociability. These relational structures feed nuanced relationships, focus on alterity in order to expand the territory between intimacy and distance, and weave their entanglement rather than balancing the scale between consensus and dissensus, or conflict and harmony. Leaving aside the logic of identity, they carve out a sense of unconditional empathy, one that refuses any verification and that relies on a sustained commitment. They also are a chance to practice multiple, split attentions within oneself as much as towards the others.
In my performance work, I look for ways to articulate this embodied, reflective adventure, outside the dance studio." (2015)
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"I am interested in dance performances as social events, where people watch other people doing things mainly with their bodies.
The politics of this situation is where I am interested in. The politics of relating, the distribution of power, the manufacturing and exchange of desire, empathy and other forces between these individuals.
This practice of people showing themselves to other people has a long history including artistic, social, political and popular cultures; bodies bear these cultures in the same time as they are individual persons. Especially important to me are the politics of female performance.
I look for situations in which the audience can relate to the performer’s body as to that of an individual as well as the carrier of all this history. To make visible how this collective history frames the perception while all participants remain individual subjects involved in a social event.
This interest in human relations leads me to collaborate with colleagues as well as with the audience, multiplying formats of sharing and confrontation." (2007)