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François Chaignaud – Petites joueuses

November 4th – 16th, 2024 Musée du Louvre, Paris
Non-stop from 7:30pm to 11:30pm

An Immersive Journey to the Medieval Louvre

©2024 Musée du Louvre : Florence Brochoire

With Petites joueuses, the dancer and choreographer François Chaignaud takes us on an immersive and continuous journey through the Louvre Médiéval : mutant and resonating creatures take over its fortifications, and form a disturbing carnival of forms, songs and unreasonable, mischievous or untamed figures.

Little player : this pejorative term, synonym of cowardice and a lack of ambition, has been appropriated by choreographer François Chaignaud in order to subvert its meanings, like a manifesto : to assert, through singularity, insolence and the lightness of bodies, a different way of occupying space, while blurring the semantic field of greatness attached to the consecrated place of Art. Little players performing continuously in the ‘Grand Louvre’, inventing their own rules, thwarting codes, introducing trouble, play, equivocation – deflating the authoritative effects of this huge exhibition machine. Taking the Louvre by the back, this community of performers reveals the archaeological layers of the medieval Louvre; one by one, each visitor discovers its foundations, its moats, its hidden strata, gaining access to a living organism, exhaling, rustling, populated by serious or comical figures. Like a prologue to the exhibition Figure du Fou, which explores the subversive value of the insane in medieval society, Petites joueuses acts as a counterpoint, a singing nave – a hullabaloo of voices, sounds and attitudes, affirming the centrality of the margin.

Text written by Gilles Amalvi for the 2024 edition of the Festival d’Automne

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Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company – Still/Here

October 30th – November 2nd, 2024 BAM, Brooklyn
118 minutes with one intermission

Still/Here after 30 Years

© Joanne Savio

30 years after its premiere, the groundbreaking dance theater work Still/Here by Bill T. Jones returns to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. In its 42nd season, The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company remounts this timeless “landmark of 20th-century dance”, underscoring its ongoing resonance with today and its ability to evoke a spirit of survival. Created during one of the most contentious and terrifying periods, the AIDS epidemic, Still/Here broke boundaries between the personal and the political and exemplified a form of dance theater that is uniquely American. In spite of its being at the center of the culture wars, or because of it, the highly formal multimedia work defined and ultimately transcended its era. In the intervening years, much has changed in the world. Though with another Pandemic behind us, wars raging, the planet failing, and technology rising, somehow the questions around mortality remain. 

The  highly formal structures of Still/Here are delivered with simplicity and sophistication, marked by spoken text, video portraits, dance and the abstract nature of gesture. Gretchen Bender’s visual concept and multimedia environment is joined by music from Kenneth Frazelle (sung by Odetta) and Vernon Reid. Long-time collaborators include Liz Prince (costumes) and Robert Wierzel (lighting). 
At the heart of Still/Here are the “Survival Workshops: Talking and Moving about Life and Death.”  These workshops were conducted across the country with people living with life-threatening illness. The participants living on the front lines of the struggle to understand our mortality are in possession of information – info possible of being a gift and a burden. The participants’ generosity of spirit and willingness to express their experience both with words and gestures was both inspiring and difficult. They are the essence of Still/Here: their gestures inform the choreography, their words the lyrics, their images the stage. They will always be Still/Here. This work is dedicated to them.

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Sankai Juku – Utsushi

October 24th – 25th, 2024 Zorlu PSM Turkcell Sahnesi, Istanbul
70 minutes

Tribute to Ushio Amagatsu

© Elian Bachini

The legendary choreographer Ushio Amagatsu who introduced Europe to butoh nearly 45 years ago, has since championed this very special Japanese dance form and built a solid fan base worldwide. While he passed away this March, his much-celebrated company Sankai Juku will be making their Turkey debut at the festival with Utsushi.

Created at the special request of international festivals willing to present Sankai Juku in various features, Utsushi is composed of excerpts from the repertory of the company, reworked and restaged by Amagatsu in order to constitute a work of its own as the quintessence of his art from the last 45 years.

As Raimund Hoghe puts it: ‘Utsushi is much more than a compilation. Ushio Amagatsu creates a breath-taking dialogue between the beauty of his work and the beauty of nature, the sounds of nature and the composed music, the dance and the wind, the floor and the sky, the stars over our heads and the fire in front of us. With Utsushi, Amagatsu opens a new door – and we can see and feel the beauty of life.’

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Hiroaki Umeda – assimilating

October 4th-5th, 2024 Le Cube Garge, Garges-lès-Gonesse
October 8th, 2024 Théâtre Hexagone, Meylan
90 minutes (double bill with split flow)

A Behavior Designer

© Hiroaki Umeda

Choreographer, dancer, and visual artist from Tokyo. After studying photography, he broadened his interest in physical expression and independently pursued cross-disciplinary dance art, incorporating visual art and digital expression without the shackles of any specific method. He began presenting works in 2000, and the piece “while going to a condition” received international acclaim. Since then, he has performed as well as created installations focusing on human physical senses in more than 150 cities throughout 40 countries, including France. Also involved in sound, video, and lighting design, Umeda’s work is highly acclaimed in the context of visual art for his methods of combining original movement and digital technology.

His latest solo assimilating expands the concept of dance and treating the human body and its environment as “one nature” in his choreography, with back and forth between the projected images and the artist’s body. Umeda is responsible for the design of movement, sound, and visuals as well as programming.

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CIE CHARA – HIT 7AYT حايط حيث (because of the wall)

October 5th, 2024 Centre Culturel de Namur, Namur
October 11th, 2024 Villa des Arts de Casablanca, Casablanca
60 minutes

Choreography of
Moroccan Daily Life

© Yoriyas

HIT 7AYT حايط حيث (because of the wall) is inspired by the city of Casablanca and its inhabitants, gestures, and choreographies of daily Moroccan life. Four dancers with roots in urban dance transform these movements of daily life into details, intentions and urgencies. They explore the walls in the city as a separation and connection between public and private space, as sites of observation or limits of movement. Memories of family and friend’s gatherings, meetings with friends or strangers are transformed to physical movements and present a bodily vision of a Moroccan society between observation and individuality, tradition and innovation.

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Nastaran Razawi Khorasani – This Is not a Dance

September 13th – 14th, 2024 Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam
September 17th, 2024 Theater Kikker, Utrecht
September 20th, 2024 Theater a/h Spui, The Hague
September 27th – 28th, 2024 De Singel, Antwerp
October 4th, 2024 Grand Theatre, Groningen
October 8th – 9th, 2024 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
October 29th – 3oth, 2024 Frascati, Amsterdam
November 4th, 2024 Teater Luwes, Jakarta
60 minutes

About Dance and Censorship

© Bas de Brouwer

This is not a dance forces you to reflect on the foundations of dance, in definition and effect.

Iris Spanbroek

In Iran, dancing has been officially prohibited since the start of the Islamitic Revolution. All dance companies have been forced to cease their activities. Many dancers and choreographers have fled abroad. Those who still live there have to be very resourceful. How are they keeping their art form alive? Theatre maker Nastaran Razawi Khorasani presents the performance This is not a dance a dance performance that deals with censorship. What can be shown, what must remain hidden? As the music and lights build towards a frenzy, Nastaran attempts to keep her dancing body in check.

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nasa4nasa – NO MERCY

October 8th – 9th, 2024 Kaaitheater, Brussels
45 minutes

A Dance Collective from Cairo

© Migliorato

NO MERCY navigates our daily virtual and non-virtual modes of feeling. During this 45-minute DJ set, nasa4nasa explores the limits of sensuality and desire interplaying with violence. The two female bodies navigate the gaze, referencing their repertoires of body image, pop, rage and intimacy. nasa4nasa will lure you in, disarm you and in the process unravel in their own drama.  

nasa4nasa is a dance collective based in Cairo co-founded by dancers Noura Seif Hassanein and Salma AbdelSalam in 2016. Housed primarily on Instagram, the collective’s work explores image-making and online presence as their ongoing dance practice. nasa4nasa’s debut performance SUASH premiered at Next Festival and MDT (2018). They were most recently awarded the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for their latest work Sham3edan (2023).  

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Eisa Jocson & Venuri Perera – Magic Maids

September 20th – 22nd, 2024 HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin
October 4th – 6th, 2024 Esplanade, Singapore
October 11th – 12th, 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
80 minutes

Two Figures Engaged in the Ritual Act of Sweeping

© National Gallery Singapore

Interweaving ritual, pageantry, performance and possession, Magic Maids presents an encounter with two figures engaged in the ritual act of sweeping. The broom, a domestic tool for cleaning and the vehicle of the witch, becomes a symbol of both oppression and resistance. It is an extension of the body and a portal for metamorphosis. The art workers and their brooms exist in a continuous state of becoming.

Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka respectively, two countries known for their significant export of domestic workers. Their collaboration began in 2022 when they noticed the absence of women at Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History in Switzerland. This observation sparked their investigation of the historical persecution of witches; in Europe and its implications for the exploitation of female labour in colonised regions. They discovered that the accusation of witchcraft continues to be a tool for persecuting migrant workers from the Global South.

Magic Maids is a bodily response to their grappling with these complex entanglements. They call upon practices of incantation and intention, using their bodies to traverse multiple territories: physical, conceptual, transnational, emotional, and gendered. The labour in performance enables an embodied inquiry into questions of representation, political subjecthood and histories of oppression. Having individually presented solo work across international festivals and platforms that follows this line of inquiry, Jocson and Perera come together for the first time to sweep out and unsettle oppressive power structures. Rewilding the domestic, they aim to release, reclaim, rejoice, and reconnect with the primal energies.

Magic Maids is an invitation to witness and reflect on the visibility of the working body, the power of female solidarity, and the enduring impact of historical injustices on modern labour practices.

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Sonya Lindfors – ONE DROP

October 25th-26th, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
110 minutes

A Stage Awakening the Ghosts

© Tuukka Ervasti

ONE DROP is a speculative summoning, a decolonial dream, an autopsy of the Western stage and an operetta. Slipping in meanings, leaking through different categories the work dives into the poetics and politics of relations, creating a stage that awakens the ghosts, connections lost or forgotten.

The title of the work refers to two separate frameworks, the one drop rhythm which is a reggae style drum beat as well as to the one drop rule of the Race Separation Act, created in the United States in the early 1900s, according to which a single drop of “Black blood” made a person “Black” despite their appearance. Through its multiple starting points the work interrogates the ghosts of the Western stage and its entanglements and relationalities to capitalism, coloniality and modernity.

ONE DROP continues Lindfors’ series of works dealing with power, representation and Black body politics.

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Parisa Madani – Pariyestan: Tails of Sisters (青蛇+白蛇: 緣起)

October 6th, 2024 ARSENIC, Lausanne
12h

Let’s Dream Together

© Mayra Wallraff

In the upcoming edition of the PARIYESTAN-multiverse – a series of durational collective dream meditations – we will focus on slow, dreamy choreography accompanied by recitations of traditional persian poetry and classical live music, this time specifically around the topics of sisterhood and motherland. sisterhood is embraced in the form of resistance. a gathering of sisters dreaming together in languages they don’t understand. they share artistic expressions freely while creating a monument in time together. through slowness, love and trust, they are powerfully exploring other possibilities of co-existing.

Parisa Madani // PSORIASIS (RIP) aka B1txx3$k?llah*fka the Persian Princis from the Gorgeous House of Gucci and the Iconic Hall of Fame Kiki House of Juicy Couture بھ پاریستان خوش آمدید Pillow Talk say ha name – the story of a long-nailed german-iranian woman of trans* experience with sharp green eyes working with live arts and the communities. in the last four years, the collective has released live and digital art on their website, a mini album (pariyestan on soundcloud). it has also started the multiverse of collective dream meditations through collaborations with international artists and shown in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and Italy. inspired by ancient persian mythologies and spiritualities, the immersive performances create spaces of worship and resistance; especially for those of non-white, neurotypical, queer & trans communities and others who are underserved by traditional and conservative legislations. in the future she might lead a spiritual revolution, tour the world as a secret popstar with big tits and/or meditate inside volcanoes until the end of time.

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