ABORIGINAL ART
Cherbourg en Cotentin fresco
From May 2nd to 7th, Elisabeth Close and James Cochran, two Australian artists, worked hard to produce a giant fresco with Aboriginal motifs on the wall of the Cherbourg-en-Cotentin (Manche) police station. This project, which is part of the partnership between Port Adelaide Enfield (South Australia) and Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, is one of the numerous activities related to the agreement between France and Australia to construct 12 submarines.
MUSIC
Tame Impala
We Love Green Festival, Sunday, 2nd June
The Australian group Tame Impala has performed on the 2nd of June at We Love Green festival. A "hypnotic beauty" show, which did not disappoint festival-goers. And do not panic, for those who have not been able to attend this concert, the group comes back on August 15th for LA ROUTE DU ROCK in Saint-Malo!
Midnight Oil
The Grand Rex, Thursday, 27th June 2019
The legendary Australian rock band has performed at the Grand Rex in Paris in front of several thousand fans. Particularly famous for its environmental commitments with its title Beds are Burning, the group put an electric atmosphere on this Parisian scene!
THEATRE
« La trilogie de la Vengeance »
Text and staging by Simon Stone
Ateliers Berthier, from 13th, March to 21st April 2019
His Medea proved it, his Three Sisters confirmed it. Simon Stone delights in taking leading female roles and rewriting them, with startling clarity, for today’s audiences. This time around, he will be drawing upon a dialogue with three of the Elizabethan dramatists: Shakespeare, Middleton and Ford. It is they who invented a new way of representing violence, the influence of which can still be detected today in television and cinema. By the same token, however, what has also been carried through into the present day is the way male and female roles are divided up, particularly in the case of the “revenge tragedies”. In line with this dividing up of roles, women are either treated as criminals or victims. Infamous or innocent. Often treated as objects, as opposed to subjects in their own right, they almost always suffer from alienation of some kind. If they are active, they transgress: their yearning for independence is a crime of lese-majesty, and must be punished. If they are passive, they fall victim to male aggression. All around them, within them, monster-like forces roam. The female gender that this theatre often testifies to is a blind spot in which male desire and anxiety intermingle with each other. By exhibiting and exploiting the horrors of such a status, Elizabethan theatre plays on the audience’s mixture of fascination and discomfort. In his aim of examining this heritage more closely, dissecting its various obscenities in the process, Stone will be putting his play to the test using female voices. An almost all-female cast will be guiding us through this descent into the living hell of misogynistic violence.
https://www.theatre-odeon.eu/fr/saison-2018-2019/spectacles-1819/la-trilogie-de-la-vengeance
« Anaïs Nin, une de ses vies »
Written and staging by Wendy Beckett
Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet, from 13th to 31st, March 2019
Parisian life in the 1930’s, Anaïs Nin meets Henry Miller. The borderline between love and art is hard to define, and soon, a parallel relationship develops between Anaïs and June, Henri Miller’s wife.
The show offers an overview of the junction between Anaïs Nin’s personal life and work at a time when her approach brought a new vision of women, love and female sexuality. Wendy Becket explores the conflict between the author and the person and tries to reveal what motivated Anaïs Nin’s audacity.
“What a mistake for a woman to wait for a man to build the world she wants, instead of creating it by herself”. Anaïs Nin
https://www.athenee-theatre.com/saison/spectacle/anais_nin.htm
DANCE
« D’Est en Ouest »
With the collaboration of Lucy Guérin
Maison des Arts et de la Culture de Créteil, from 14th to 16 March at 20 pm
The juvenile freshness and the hybrid technique of Groupe Grenade performers - who refuse to choose between classical, contemporary, jazz or hip-hop dance because the world is half-breed - has forged their unique talent. Driven by choreographer Josette Baïz since its creation in 1990, this company that brings together nearly thirty young dancers moves along a suitable path. At Josette Baïz’s request, six major contemporary choreographers entrusted excerpts from their repertoires to the company. Canadian Crystal Pite, Korean Eun-Me Ahn, Anglo-Bengali Akram Khan, Israeli Barak Marshall, Belgian Wim Vandekeybus and Australian Lucy Guerin headline this wonderful transmission program that lives up to its name: « From East to West, from Melbourne to Vancouver », landing in Aix-en-Provence, where the company is based, and drawing a dancing arch that brings all together.
https://www.theatredelaville-paris.com/en/spectacles/saison-2018-2019/danse/dest-en-ouest
« Pile of Bones »
Stephanie Lake
Théâtre National de Chaillot, from 23rd to 29th May 2019
Revealed here in Chaillot in 2015, the Australian choreographer signs one her most accomplished pieces with Pile of Bones. A visual feast where dance becomes an act of survival.
An acclaimed performer over the last 15 years with the companies Lucy Guerin Inc. and Chunky Move, Stephanie Lake now develops work as a choreographer. With a series of remarkable creations (DUAL, Mix Tape and Double Blind), the Australian has imposed her identity with a precise gesture, all in sensations. Pile of Bones emphasises this approach with a major quartet. The play of hands, like waves of movement, is superb. The body, manipulated like that of a marionette, is troubling. The effects of forward/rewind slow-motion are almost cinematographic. Stephanie Lake looks to follow more emotional than linear logic on set. From ruptures to unisons, everything in this choreography is akin to a sensitive voyage that the quartet of solo artists considers as a crossing of emotions. A ritual served by dancers? Maybe a little. Stephanie Lake talks in her way in the belief in human beings, and their doubts.
In September 2018, Stephanie Lake has won the Outstanding Achievement in Choreography award for Pile of Bones, which is her second Australian Dance Award.
https://www.theatre-chaillot.fr/en/saison-2018-2019/pile-bones
Joanne Leighton’s choregraphies
Joanne Leighton is a Belgian choreographer, of Australian origin living in Ile-de-France, whose career is closely linked to a vision of original and evolving dance. Her approach explores the notions of space and site as a whole, a common one populated by territories, identities, interdependent spaces. She proposes an opening towards a work on stage and off stage where each place beyond the borders, concrete or virtual and where each body beyond the individualities, becomes the field of the choreographic experimentation and question the notion of the same and the other.
Joanne Leighton’s choregraphies’ programmation teasing :
http://www.wldn.fr/index.php/calendrier/biographie-joanne-leighton/
« Exquisite Corpses »
Théâtre de Cachan, 21st March at 20h30
Time: 58min
Exquisite corpses are known to these stories - inheritance of the Surrealists! - nested over an unbridled imagination that blurred the tracks of the author's question. In 2012, in "Corps Exquis", Joanne Leighton choreographed a slow walk of one minute, then invited a choreographer to continue this first sequence of gesture, and so on, associating 57 choreographers - among whom François Chaignaud, Myriam Gourfink, Daniel Linehan, Latifia Laabissi or Ambra Senatore - each composing a one-minute module from the last ten seconds of the previous one. It is by inviting each choreographer to transmit as he wishes his choreographic subjects, an exquisite corpse is thus built. Today, from this large score of 58 interventions, the artistic collaborators join forces to create Corps Exquis in a new creation of a solo with three bodies, and trace the furrows of a material kneaded of breaks, influences and continuities to question the reality and the permanence of the work.
http://ccnnantes.fr/project/wldn-•-joanne-leighton-corps-exquis/
https://biennale.alabriqueterie.com/fr/la-biennale/2019/wldn-joanne-leighton-corps-exquis
« Songlines »
Scène Nationale de l’Essonne Agora-Desnos (91), 26th March 2019
In the continuum of her previous shows, choregrapher Joanne Leighton takes a step further in the furrow of her favorite gesture: walking. Among Australian Aborigines, the “songlines” are the “singing trails” inscribed in the landscapes by old legendary beings who would roam the immensity singing the elements’ names they crossed like as so many landmarks. The choregrapher, of Australian origin, is inspired by it to seize this guiding movement which is the walk with which the body, the spirit and the environment tend to align.
https://www.scenenationale-essonne.com/programme/songlines
http://www.wldn.fr/index.php/videos/songlines/
« L &L »
A Camille Laurens’ text
From 28th March to 27th April in Paris in suburb in the context of Concordan(s)es festival
In front of a blank page, the body of the writer is often forgotten. Faced with a text, the choreographer’s inspiration can be cut short. United by the festival Concordan(s)e, Camille Laurens and Joanne Leighton have agreed to collaborate, each embarking towards an artistic territory that is not their own. The two find common ground through walking and repetition, ideas that each artists questions in their work. Walking composes, walking writes, walking invents an enduring link with the world.
https://biennale.alabriqueterie.com/fr/la-biennale/2019/joanne-leighton-et-camille-laurens
http://www.concordanse.com/l-l
« 9000 Steps »
Espace Culturel Boris Vian, Les Ulis « Rencontres Essonne Danse »
5th April 2019
http://www.wldn.fr/index.php/videos/pieces/
« Les Modulables »
Salle Jean Montaru, Marcoussis « Rencontres Essonne Danse », 15th March 2019
Hors d’Oeuvres, Juvisy-sur-Orge, 25th and 26th May 2019
« WALK »
1st June 2019
Opening night of Festival June Events - Atelier de Paris / CDCN
Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris
EXHIBITION
« When doing is saying »
Angelica Mesiti
Palais de Tokyo, from 20th February to 12th May
It is often said that a look is more evocative than a word ... Our body expresses much more than we imagine: it is the whole issue of nonverbal communication. The Australian artist Angelica Mesiti interfered in the artistic performance’s world (we think of dance) as well as in the world of music, to better explore the link between artistic expression and the way of communication. The hanging puts forward, over 1000 m2, its video installations that document, in a pathbreaking and fun way, all the grace and poetry of our corporal and musical languages. Dance and choreographic language, sign language or musical language are therefore evoked as social and political actions that unite us despite our differences. Coming out of this fascinating hanging, you will not see your daily actions of the same eye: do your most ordinary actions have a precise meaning, in the same way that your words can touch the person who receives them? Whatever your favorite way of communication, there is no doubt that this artistic experience will open new horizons for you!
https://www.arts-in-the-city.com/2019/02/11/quand-faire-cest-dire/
https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/fr/evenement/angelica-mesiti
CONTEMPORARY CIRCUS
« Circa & Quatuor Debussy – Opus »
Circa Contemporary Circus
Tour in France from 27th March to 12th May – a show in Paris 12th May in La Philarmonie
Fourteen acrobats and a string quartet celebrate the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Shostakovich’s quartets are by turns intimate, passionate, lyrical, ironic and deeply moving personal testimonies by one of the 20th Century’s greatest composers. In Opus, three of his quartets form the musical and dramatic spine of a red-hot fusion of extreme acrobatics, lyrical movement and group choreography.
Opus begins from a solo performer suspended on a rope serenaded by musicians, then moves through rapidly alternating scenes of dislocated stillness and violent explosions into geometries of acrobats intersected by extreme physicality to arrive at exquisitely detailed and nuanced choreographies of acrobats flying, balancing and landing.
Opus explores the complex relationships between the individual and the group, between the march of history and the dictates of the heart and between the tragic and the comic. This is groundbreaking work of intense power. A melding of music and bodies at the highest level.
The company: https://circa.org.au
La Philarmonie : https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/activity/spectacle/19040-circa-quatuor-debussy
HUMOUR
« The Umbilical Brothers »
Staging by Davis Collins and Shane Douglas
Théâtre des Mathurins, Monday 1st April 2019 at 20h and Tuesday 2nd April 2019 at 19h
As an international phenomenon of humour, the Umbilical Brothers arrive for the first time in France for two exceptional performances at the Théâtre des Mathurins in Paris. Davis Collins and Shane Douglas use their physical skills, sound effects and comedy in a limitless comic world.
The international press speaks about it:
"Sublime Comedy" New York Times
"Marcel Marceau under good drugs" Sydney Morning Herald
"Incredibly accurate, incredibly physical, howling with laughter" The Observer (GB)
https://www.theatredesmathurins.com/spectacle/414/the-umbilical-brothers