Elaine Mitchener

the then + the now = now time

Ménagerie de verre
novembernov 16 – 17

French premiere

1h

Prices €8 to €20
Subscribers €8 and €15

Ménagerie de verre
Ménagerie de verre
12, rue Lechevin
75011 Paris
01 43 38 33 44

METRO
Ligne 3 (Parmentier)
Ligne 9 (Saint-Ambroise)
Ligne 5 (Richard-Lenoir)

Want to go

Monday november 16

19h

Tuesday november 17

19h

Elaine Mitchener concept and music. 
Dam Van Huynh direction and choreography. 
Antony Hateley lighting design. 
Michael Picknett sound and lighting engineering.
Music recorded at Ben Marc Studios

Created in 2019.
Commissioned by MaerzMusik—Festival 

In partnership with La Muse en Circuit.
Le Festival d’Automne à Paris and La Ménagerie de verre present this show as a corealisation. 

British vocalist, movement artist and composer of Afro-Caribbean origin, Elaine Mitchener manifests, through the intensity of her presence, voice and gestures, the traces, both past and present, of discrimination and colonial wounds, exposed in all their rawness.


In his Theses On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin developed in 1940 the subversive notion of active remembrance. Our responsibility to the victims of history requires of us the following things: to reject the official version of history established by the victorious, to fight against the fading into the background of the defeated, to remember them, to safeguard within the present a past neither closed nor complete, to make it appear here and now, as threatening as it is, unreconciled with the figures of domination, and to create “constellations” between the different eras. the then + the now = now time explores this notion, the radicality of which, as well as its visceral struggles, felt in every way by the body, both liberate and heal. Elaine Mitchener, an improviser and performer who draws upon a wide range of vocal forms, gives voice to the words of James Baldwin, the abolitionist militant Sojourner Truth and black feminism theorist bell hooks. We also hear a sound-based collage which includes a speech by Labour MP David Lammy, songs from the Caribbean, crowd noises, and deep vibrations. In this way, the work lays down a challenge before us, destabilising time and space, in order to spark off an ever-active memory once again.

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