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Penser et donner à voir le geste ordinaire : entre transmission, détournement et réinvention

Catherine Cyr

Explorer l’ordinaire

Ariane Martinez
This dossier examines how the live performance arts (physical theatre, mime, dance, performance, puppetry and street theatre) highlight our ordinary gestures and, in doing so, rethink and transform them. The interpretation and staging of basic gestures (walking, standing, sitting) and of the social and intimate gestures of everyday life (having a drink, shaking hands, kissing) developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Although the representation of everyday life flourished with naturalism, it was never confined to aesthetic realism. Whether the ordinary gesture enacts bodily sensations as closely as possible or is transformed with flair, its depiction on stage proves to be a reflection of attitudes in the world and a medium of recognition and empathy.

L’ordinaire et l’extraordinaire dans le théâtre contemporain : généalogies

Marco De Marinis
In theatre from the 20th century to the present, when the body, gestures and physical actions have gradually become central to theatrical practices and theoretical reflection, the dialectic between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the everyday and the uncommon, becomes the main issue. This article examines different ways in which contemporary dance and theatre artists conceived and worked on those relations. Two main trends are apparent: the first is a tendency to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary (with, of course, a large variety of possible positions and results); the second involves a search for the extraordinary through distance from / opposition to the ordinary, in quest of a whole different dimension of gesture and physical action, which the performer attempts to find or reactivate in the depths of his body-memory.

Pédagogie du jeu masqué : transformer le geste ordinaire en poème scénique

Guy Freixe
Liberated from articulated language, the mask opens up new circuits for expression. By changing self-image, it allows the actor to create a totally new corporality. The actor thus rediscovers the strength of gesture and the sustaining of attitudes, as if he were speaking a foreign language. No longer can a gesture be performed on stage as it occurs in real life. A movement sufficiently expressive for an uncovered face becomes illegible once the face is masked. It must be amplified on one hand and purified on the other. The mask awakens the actor’s inner music by showing him the way to stylize and transpose the performed action. Any gesture, even the most ordinary, becomes metaphorical and rhythmic.

La mémoire des gestes de l’esclavage dans les pratiques performatives caribéennes

Fabienne Viala
This article examines the use of the body and the role of gesture in Caribbean performance, more specifically in Guadeloupe’s post-plantation society. With techni’ka, the choreographer Léna Blou reinvents the ordinary gestures inherited from slavery into fundamental body states that convert bodily constraint into creativity and become unlimited socio-aesthetic instruments of expression. The iguana parades of performers Annabel Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut make sense of the vulnerability of French Caribbean society. By imposing extraordinary body movements in the public space, they challenge the racialized body language established by colonial racism. The invention of an embodied grammar governed by bodily constraint and imbalance restores the history of slavery within a reparative memorial strategy that goes beyond a traumatic historical heritage thanks to a new coding of its somatic legacy.

Les contaminations urbaines de Jeanne Simone

Alix de Morant
Designed for an urban setting, the works of the choreographer Laure Terrier combine the spatial qualities of their venue and the tonalities of their surroundings with those of a body work founded on the protocols of Contact Improvisation, the somatic practices of Body-Mind Centering and the reappropriation of ordinary gestures. The analysis of her latest creation, Nous sommes (We are), presented at the Mimos Festival in 2015, is based on its performance in September of the same year in the mixed-arts context of Place Arnaud-Bernard in Toulouse. In this piece, somatic imagination and gestural performance compete to reestablish a moment of social harmony.

Ces gestes qui nous font : May B de Maguy Marin

Pascale Caemerbeke
May B, a masterpiece of contemporary dance created by Maguy Marin in 1981, showcases the ordinary, immemorial gestures that made us who we are and ground us as a community. Original gestures that transcend cultures and eras, they are performed rhythmically by a mixed bag of people hobbling about, weary but capable of wildly energetic movement as well. This choir of random individuals generates a political dynamic resulting in a being-together that is marked by a rejection of uniformity and that, for this reason, continues to resonate with us.

La transmission d’un répertoire gestuel : le cas d’Encore une heure si courte

Véronique Muscianisi
This paper addresses the treatment of ordinary gestures in a performance of the Théâtre du Mouvement company (France): Encore une heure si courte. A walking sequence is studied in two versions of the play, one from 1989 and the other from 2014. We seek to understand how the ordinary unfolds in a precise gestural sequence and how the same sequence is passed on and interpreted by performers of different generations.

Prouesses du regard : le geste du regard entre photographie, pratique physique et performance

Cosimo Chiarelli
Based on the mimed tennis match in the final sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), this article tackles the question of gaze gestures at the intersection of sports, corporeal mime and photography. The global reorganization of gazing experience induced by the photographic device at the start of the modern era also instills a tension and a separation between the corporeal and mechanical gaze, a sometimes painful divide that was appropriated by theatre. The examples analyzed, including Étienne Decroux’s series Le sport, Pierre Rigal’s choreography Press, and Manuel Vason’s performance Metáfora, offer various possible solutions to this divide, but also reflect a shared aspiration towards a possible form of reinforced, powerful gaze that could arise from the synthesis of these two types of gaze.

Pour un (extra)ordinaire art de choir : les chutes des Deschiens, personnages de Jérôme Deschamps et Macha Makeïeff

Marie Duret-Pujol
Based on a rupture with order, with a way of being and carrying oneself, a fall appears to be an anomaly, a departure from the norm. As a gesture, it can be both ordinary and extraordinary: ordinary, in that it occurs in everyday life and extraordinary, in that it departs from a norm and occurs unexpectedly. This paper examines the use of burlesque falls in their relation to everyday norms in the plays of Jérôme Deschamps and Makeïeff.

Quand la figure se met debout

Marie Garré Nicoară
The article considers how the puppet’s instability leads us to view standing as a struggle against falling, and how this “rise of the puppets”, actualizing these first gestures of presence and address, expresses an alternative way to understand certain assumptions about theatrical relations. By examining the various modes of performer-puppet relations in the work of Ilka Schönbein and the Mossoux-Bonté, we aim to demonstrate how the manner of standing hinges on the interdependence of performer and puppet and how the performer’s body can reinvent itself – mainly through a search for, refusal or inversion of verticality – based on the figure’s vertical movement.

Le pari du réel : entretien avec Éric Lacascade à partir des Bas-fonds de Gorki

Sophie Lucet

Lorsque l’espace est premier

Véronique Lemaire

Vera Icona : poétique de l’image-scène

Véronique Caye

L’espace en premier lieu…

Éric Soyer and Véronique Lemaire

Au commencement, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre…

Peter Missotten

L’image vraie

Véronique Caye

Carnet de photographies

Véronique Lemaire, Véronique Caye, Éric Soyer and Peter Missotten

Le travail du corps en tant qu’instrument vocal : l’étude des expériences de formation au sein d’un cours de voix et d’interprétation

Marie-Eve Skelling Desmeules
This article aims to better understand physical training experiences within the context of the class Voix et interprétation I (Voice and Interpretation 1) taught by Pascal Belleau at the École supérieure de théâtre (Université du Québec à Montréal) during the 2013 fall semester. Rooted in the concept of experience (Dewey, 2005) and in activity theory (Engeström, 1987 et 2007), this interpretative qualitative research examines how the course led student actors to anchor their voice work in acting and corporeal exercises, leave their comfort zone, draw on their visceral emotions and nurture a sense of confidence in themselves and others. These results are then placed in perspective in light of activity theory.

Scènes de Téhéran : regards sur le 36e Festival Fadjr de théâtre

Christine Hamon-Sirejols
Founded in 1983, the Fadjr International Theater Festival is held every year in Iran and features works from local and international artists. The 36th festival took place in January 2018 before U.S. economic sanctions were imposed. Over 200 productions and 500 performances were offered in a broad variety of venues including the Tehran City Theater, private homes, garages, etc. Among the participants were Jérôme Bel, Rimini Protokoll, Christopher Rüping, Philippe Quesne, and a host of directors from throughout the country. The event attracted enthusiastic audiences and presented a wide diversity of artistic approaches, from visual theatre to site-specific performances. The festival was a huge success and demonstrated the importance of the performing arts in Iran today.

Jeu, nos 166, 168 (2018) / Corps-Objet-Image, no 3 (2018) / Alternatives théâtrales, no 133 (2017)

Karolann St-Amand

GILBERT DAVID (dir.), Carole Fréchette, dramaturge : un théâtre sur le qui-vive, Nota bene, « Études culturelles », 2017, 414 p.

Elizabeth Bourget

JOSEPH DANAN, Absence et présence du texte théâtral, Arles, Actes Sud-Papiers, « Apprendre », 2018, 96 p.

Philippe Manevy