Interviews
Three questions to Elisa Shua Dusapin about her novel, Vladivostok Circus
Elisa Shua Dusapin
In Vladivostok, a trio is training at the Russian bar in a deserted circus.
The porters Nino and Anton, make Anna fly.
The team is preparing for the international competition in Ulan-Ude.
The goal? Four triple somersaults without getting off the bar.
On the choices of Vladivostok and Ulan-Ude and its "circus championship".
Vladivostok, a fascinating mix of East and West, a port city, a city of departures and arrivals, a secret city, submarines, a military city, the remains of the war, the fog, the cold, the apparent coldness of the inhabitants.
But also the desire of the authorities to make it attractive, the huge construction sites everywhere to modernize it, the international university campus, the huge bridges that I saw as attempts to reach out to the rest of the world so as not to be forgotten... A sad and cold beauty, magnetic, naked.
The relationship to the body of your heroine, Nathalie, is singular.
Vladivostok, a fascinating mix of East and West, a port city, a city of departures and arrivals, a secret city, submarines, a military city, the remains of the war, the fog, the cold, the apparent coldness of the inhabitants.
But also the desire of the authorities to make it attractive, the huge construction sites everywhere to modernize it, the international university campus, the huge bridges that I saw as attempts to reach out to the rest of the world so as not to be forgotten... A sad and cold beauty, magnetic, naked.
What links your published stories?
In my opinion, the endless questioning of the right distance between people, the concern to be able to communicate truly, the feeling, the need and the desire for solitude which is at the same time
painful.
Without forgetting the quest for oneself, a form of oppression "in oneself" and at the same time, a will of immense opening on the world and the others.
Your wish for Colossus?
t's a combination of interests that have been present since I started choreographing twenty years ago.
The main idea of confronting an individuality with a group - a mass, a swarm, a cloud or a community - and the desire to choreograph for large casts have been with me for several decades.
The piece plays on the idea of cooperation.
Two fascinations unfold in it. One is a questioning of what happens within an extended group or a mass of dancers who have to collaborate. We can thus raise forms of cooperation there. But also myriads of tensions, tug-of-war and dissensus.
Beyond the displacements, decenterings and rejections, there is this extraordinary force resulting from a common and collective action.
The other fascination concerns the individual. What is the status of being one's own person in relation to the group on the stage and beyond in connection with so many people of a common humanity throughout the world?
It is therefore, on the one hand, a reflection and variation on the way a society functions. And of a dive in the intimacy and the individuality at work. This in order to reveal their space of the inside.
The opening image evokes the pupil of an eye animated by performers who stretch out and then straighten their busts.
The opening image evokes the pupil of an eye animated by performers who stretch out and then straighten their busts.
This opening scene seems to me to participate in a utopian perspective that sees people existing individually only by integrating into a common organism.
Whether one thinks of a sea anemone, a flower or the shape of a wave.
On the puppet dimension and the manipulation of a puppet body.
This idea of control literally fascinates me. That this one is internal with its own body. Or the presence of an external force manipulating you.
I wonder to what extent our actions or movements can be autonomous or directed.
Is thinking for oneself essentially a reflection of one's upbringing, social background or even a set of religious or secular beliefs?
These are questions I keep coming back to. In my opinion, dance can wonderfully transmit and illustrate these issues.
Three questions to La Ribot about her choreography, DIEstinguished.
La Ribot
For 30 years, the multidisciplinary artist La Ribot has been imagining burlesque and pop worlds, sensitive and dramatic. Her piece DIEstinguished mixes body operator (who films anatomies and dance) and the dancing body performing on the spot.
DIEstinguished is inspired by LaBOLA, a piece about permanent transformation.
Yes, one - LaBOLA - is part of the other - DIEstinguished. The vision of LaBOLA is part of my speech at the Golden Lion award for my career at the Dance Biennale in October 2020 in Venice.
It is a utopia of how we might connect with each other. Here are some excerpts: "I imagine that we could all be dancing non-stop... all at once, and doing almost the same thing: constantly transforming ourselves, going through all kinds of experiences; starting, for example, with ourselves; exchanging shirts, pants, hats, shoes, towels and dresses... shapes, bellies, hair, noses, chicken legs, and skulls...
Swapping our bodies and lives, our stories and lies, our women and men, swapping horns, complaints and asses, swapping name, face and passport.
How does DIEstinguished present itself?
This is one of the most danced projects of my artistic career. It is a total dance realization, of which LaBOLA is the core. But DIEstinguished brings into play another dimension singularly linked to the video image.
It is the fruit of a whole work of the body operator that I developed in video since about twenty years. In this case, the dance emerges from the very body of the dancers as an experience of the interior.
What does this video filming bring, fragmenting the bodies?
The video appears late in the distinguished pieces I have created since 1993. It is with piece 34, a video to be precise, that I discovered my interest in a dance that develops a point of view.
In this case, that of the choreographer and performer that I was. Thanks to a handycam held in my hand, I could modulate, change the subjective and objective process of the dance. And to witness an experience that I was in the process of realizing.
It is thus from the years 2000 that my researches and finds are deployed with the video. Thus in films like Mariachi 17 and Cuarto de oro (2008), the latter is made around the actress Christina Hoyos, star of the trilogy of Antonio Gades and Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding, Carmen and Love Sorcerer. These videos open up the viewpoint of the dancing body.
And for smartphones?
It is a combination of two visions. One is scenic and traditional, almost flat and distant, while the other is very close to the bodies, moving and fragmented. It is thus a question of two simultaneous pieces carried out according to very contrasted points of view and framings.
Hence an external and overall perception of the piece, on the one hand. And a fragmented view almost emotional the room, on the other. By nature, the smartphone becomes for the dancers what it is in our lives, a prosthesis.
