Living bodies and flesh communicate without the need for language (Fabienne Martin-Juchat, L'aventure du corps, page 20).
Between the verbal and the non-verbal, there is a plurality of voices and forms, a plurality of bodily interpretations. How do we disentangle the internal from the external, and stage our bodily images and realities?
What happens to our bodies when we dance freely, and how do they relate to others?
Movement is a physical sensation, an emotion, a thought. With technological mediation, we redefine what puts us in motion. What's the right place for technology?
The body matters is a performative, participatory staging inspired by the book L'aventure du corps. La communication corporelle, une voie vers l'émancipation, written in 2020 by Fabienne Martin-Juchat, anthropologist of bodily and emotional communication. The book's 12 chapters offer different observations on the role of the body for contemporary man, and make us reflect on the need for an evolution from the structural point of view of society, and the integration of somatic practices in the fields of education and health in the public sphere.
The project represents key points extracted from each chapter of the book, and takes the form of an original contemporary dance creation, where the final work is nourished by natural and digital elements, and all that the audience can spontaneously bring to moments of interaction. With the aim of stimulating restorative bodily expression, the product of an encounter between body and environment, the work brings together artists and researchers to consolidate a collaboration between art, research and experimental practice.
Five performers lead the audience through an experience of variable duration, where real and fictional time intersect and support each other. The performance begins in a circumscribed space that is immediately inhabited by both the dancers and the audience, who can move about freely. The performers expand the dimension of this space by increasing the amplitude of their displacements. The audience is invited to be a dancer too, in any way they wish, or to be an observant spectator. The artistic proposition invites to be traversed, manipulated, even disturbed. It no longer belongs to the artists, but to the audience itself, which must organize itself.
The presence of technology can be seen in the use of connected watches, now commonplace in the health sector, and evidence of the way in which everyone is able to access invisible data about their own living bodies.
A collaboration between Compagnie Voix (Paris), Cie. ZEIT/GEIST (Stuttgart / Berlin) and Université Grenoble Alpes - ANR Labcom MeetUX.
