Jérôme Bel, Estelle Zhong Mengual

Danses non humaines

MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis
septembersept 25 – 27
1/2

1h15

Prices €8 to €25 
Subscribers €8 to €18

Thursday september 25

20h30

Friday september 26

20h30

Saturday september 27

18h

Conception Jérôme Bel, Estelle Zhong Mengual. Assistant Chiara Gallerani. Text Jérôme Bel, Estelle Zhong Mengual ; extract from Baptiste Morizot, Andrea Olga Mantovani, S’enforester, Paris, Éditions d’une Rive à l’Autre, 2022, p. 28. Choreographies Pina Baush – Nelken line, music West End Blues composed by Joseph Oliver, performed by Louis Armstrong; excerpt from the piece Nelken (The Carnations) (1982), choreography and direction Pina Bausch, set design Peter Pabst, costumes Marion Cito, dramaturgy Raimund Hoghe, collaboration Matthias Burkert, Hans Pop, music Jones, Lehar, Oliver, Tauber, Tucker and others ; performance rights Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt, in representation of the Pina Bausch Foundation, Wuppertal / Gaspard Charon / Isadora Duncan – Water study (approx. 1900), music by Frantz Schubert / Loïe Fuller - Danse serpentine (1892), music by Camille Saint Saens / Xavier Le Roy – Le vocabulaire des lions (2011) / Sergiu Matis – The Siberian crane, from the piece Extinction room (Hopeless.) (2019), concept and choreography by Sergiu Matis, sound composition by Antye Greie-Ripatti, text by Philip Ingman. With Gaspard Charon, Sherwood Chen, Chiara Gallerani, Elisabeth Schwartz, Lisa Vilret, Estelle Zhong Mengual. Costumes the dancers. General stage management Maxime Kurvers. Artistic advisor and executive direction R.B. Jérôme Bel – Rebecca Lasselin. Administration Sandro Grando.

Production R.B. Jérôme Bel
Co-production Musée du Louvre; Festival d’Automne à Paris; CND – Centre national de la danse; Fonds de dotation du Quartz – Scène nationale de Brest; Maison de la Danse – Lyon, European Centre for Creation; R.B. Jérôme Bel
With the support of La Ménagerie de verre for rehearsal space provision
Acknowledgements Sébastien Allard, Cédric Andrieux and Raphaelle Delaunay/CNSMDP, Carolin Brandl/Choreographing Politic at the Bode-Museum (Berlin), Salomon Bausch, Ismaël Dia and Annette Reschke/Pina Bausch Foundation, Ana Janevski/MoMA, Laetitia Dosch, Valérie Dréville, Claire Le Gouic, Anne Martin, Baptiste Morizot, Madeline Ritter
R.B. Jérôme Bel is supported by the DRAC Île-de-France – French Ministry of Culture
Jérôme Bel and Estelle Zhong Mengual are associate artists at the Comédie de Caen CDN de Normandie
For ecological reasons, the company R.B. Jérôme Bel no longer travels by plane

In this piece presented in the heart of the Louvre as part of the 2023 Festival d’Automne, Jérôme Bel and Estelle Zhong Mengual take us on a guided visit via choreographies which are the living proof of to what extent dance is a domain not just reserved to humanity. They experience, through action, the idea that the body is the means for a shift by the human being towards other life forms.

In this project created in the Louvre galleries, Jérôme Bel extends to the world of the non-human his research into dance and the other. This collaboration with the art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual enables him to identify the different strategies chosen by choreographers in order to organize the potential otherness of the human body, whether they borrow shapes from the animal or plant worlds or from elements of nature. This walkabout enables us to navigate between several figures of established western dance, together giving rise to a non-anthropocentric form of organicity. With clear echoes to the urgency of the ecological crisis, this return to a horizontality of all living beings reaffirms the central place occupied by our sensitivity in relation to the world, presented here as the means for a broadening of our awareness of our place in nature. Firmly anchored in its own present, this "exhibition of dances" offers a shared in vivo experience which ties in with the overwhelming need to rethink the shapes and contours of what is common to us all.

In the same place