Gisèle Vienne Performance

First performed in Paris at the Station Nord d’Aubervilliers in September 2020, during the brief opening of cultural venues permitted by the current sanitary and political context, this performance for three moving bodies is traversed by the ghosts of the crowd, party and the collective.

If this performance has three performers in common with Crowd, Sophie Demeyer, Katia Petrowick and Theo Livesey, it is in fact its negative, and is characterized by the absence or lack of crowd, and the latter’s vital necessity. All of Gisèle Vienne’s work is political, whether it be the artistic and philosophical issues it poses, or the questioning of culturally-constructed perception and its eventual shifts. This work is a direct and visceral way of responding to pain of a deep, immediate nature, that of bodies constrained, held back by politics and its systems of domination. The staging of absent bodies is traversed by the question of how emotions are shared socially, and resonates with the work of the professor and doctor of Psychology, Bernard Rimé, on the necessity of the crowd and the dangers of isolation and de-socialization. Finding ourselves once again in the public space, a vital source of creativity, and taking over alternative venues, such as the Station Nord in Aubervilliers, will be just one of promises that this performance has in store for us.