HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #1
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #1 2017-2018
Amélie Poirier was born into a family of embroiderers from northern France. It seems that his great-grandfather left for Algeria at the beginning of the 20th century to trade. In its family mythology and through this craft, there are therefore incessant back and forth between this village in northern France and the Maghreb and the supposed violence of a colonial look.
" Voilées " is a dialogue between an actress / performer - who speaks out and those of other women around the "veil issue" - a dancer who manipulates embroidered fabrics from this village and an electro-acoustic musician who will work with the sounds of textile machines in particular.
Since 2013, Amélie Poirier has been working in Villers-Outréaux and the surrounding municipalities - the family village in northern France - and has been talking to residents about textiles (she then works on these texts in order to stage them through readings on the territory: this project is supported by the Département du Nord and the Region in particular). This project - although distinct from this show currently being created - allows him to have a first inventory of the complex links between the "textile and territory".
I am completing a doctoral research on artists from the interwar period whose political positions led them to create, in a context of survival, the exile of Nazi Germany. Faced with the photographic archives of these bodies and the narrative of these artists, destabilizing questions emerge: what is it that makes dance political? Is there a "political gesture" beyond political ideas?
My current choreographic research attempts to set this reflection in motion.
It is not a question of politics but of experimenting with different ways of "taking a stand" based on speeches that interpreters have in their ears. The expression "to take a position" will thus be included in several of its meanings. "Where to find yourself and how to orient yourself" are questions that arise on several levels. Where do we start from and where do we go from here?
We can focus our attention on a pivotal point of our own body but it is also possible to consider ourselves in a larger, even gigantic space, on the scale of space, of the planetary system...
The social positioning itself is governed by questions of orientation: more to the right than the right, to the far left, always next to its neighbour.
The bodies of the three performers are always in connection: each evolves in space while keeping the same reference point on the body of another. Within this interconnection, which constitutes the global movement of bodies in space, the dancers are immersed in a sound montage, different for each one. This montage influences the rhythm, presence and gestures of the performers. What they hear is sometimes sounded: by their own voices or by the intervention of a sound artist who makes certain passages of the soundtracks audible to the audience.
The primary intention is to stage a joke, a tale, a fiction based on real facts.
We seek to address contemporary issues based on the most advanced scientific and medical research in terms of transhumanism. Whether it is biotechnology, augmented humans, bio-medicines, DNA sequencing or connected objects, our society is changing in unexpected ways. Our next great revolutions will take place inside our bodies. We will discuss the philosophical aspect of these future "great ethical upheavals". All the interest we have in these great researches and inventions will not be based on what already exists. No. Our starting point is imagination as a source of invention. Artistically we will bypass these subjects to address only one question: Does (eternal) life have a meaning?
We are talking about the standards that are set in our societies of excellence and success. These standards become health references until they define the quality of our small intestine. We know that we will always be someone else's patient. We question the fact that the first vector of success is our good health. Whether this health is at the same level as our salaries, promotions or benefits. We question the health of the Society by example. Have we become qualitative and evaluable? From then on, being in default would become one of the symptoms triggering the refusal, the rejection, the dismissal that this "future society" will judge at its own discretion. What position should we take in the kingdom by the standard metre of the "I"?
VOILEES
AMELIE POIRIER
EN VOÛT
MARION SAGE
IN MORTEM
ARDESTOP
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #2
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #2 2018-2019
Amélie Marneffe // Celebration
Celebration is a place where you enter to see and participate in a performance and which takes the form of a crossing. Our vehicle to accompany the audience is vibratory and ecstatic, it takes the visitor/spectator into a unique experience between now and elsewhere. The audience is accompanied in this crossing of the deep layers of the human and the inhuman, the animate and inanimate by direct observations, sensations and participation, and it is by giving spiritual matter, experiences and the spectacular that the artistic proposal attempts to bring about a virtuous transformation in the public's relationship to its existence at the time of work.
The Celebration project is designed for 3 performers, including one light performer (Anthony Merleau, Simon Loiseau and Amélie Marneffe) and is designed for a three-dimensional presentation space that can accommodate the spectator in walking or sitting forms. The device, which does not require hanging, allows the work to be presented in places of entertainment or exhibitions.
The performers will alternate moments of direct and personal exchanges with the visitor and spectacular ones with the entire audience.
My artistic approach is halfway between visual arts and choreography. With my pieces and performances, I set up plastic devices, activated by dancers, in order to build a poetics of transformations. Sounds, bodies, lights are intertwined and through this mesh invite the spectators to build themselves what they are perceiving.
My dramaturgical choices, devoid of narrative, aim at constant equivocity, sufficient instability for the spectators to encourage the displacement of their perceptions.
My choreographic writing is a writing of relationships (between the dancers' bodies, the ground, the air, space or possible objects). It is about clarifying ways of moving or being moved to connect with the other. I work to grasp the conditions for the appearance of images, to let them shine through rather than to fabricate them, preferring to build structures that welcome the hazard and are based on the exacerbation of the performers' sensations and emotions.
My choreographic writing is composed of several overlapping elements that encourage the performers to enter a particular body state, thus generating the emergence of a specific material in spontaneous gestures.
Julie Gouju // Faire le monstre
The research work will be guided by a question: How can an interpreter be a choir with several voices? What is the language of monsters? How can you speak it if you don't become a monster yourself? If monsters have bodies with several heads, do they speak languages to several subjects? How does the monstrous arise from the gap between a body and several voices?
Faire le monstre is a solo project for a female performer in which I continue my exploration of orality by looking for ways to be monstrous in the language. "Would a being who is nothing more than his language be a monster?" asks the contemporary poet Claude Louis Combet.
In this solo, I would like to create a language that coincides with the body and a body that would only be its language. For this solo, I would like to write a text. A text that says the word that happens and makes orality the subject of the writing process. I understand this text as a gesture, as something that can be written to be better undone on stage. It is a dance text whose meaning does not only belong to the realm of language and which no longer makes it possible to draw a clear boundary between the meaning of language and that of the body. By questioning these boundaries, he would question the meaning itself. In the end, this text does not seek to deviate from meaning, but to produce, by means of the senses, a deviation from meaning itself. This separation of meaning will be sought within the language, by the voice, but also in the gap between the voice and the body.
CELEBRATION
AMELIE MARNEFFE
EN LIEU SÛR
THIBAUD LE MAGUER
FAON
JULIE GOUJU
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #3
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #3 2019-2020
Caroline Décloitre (Hej Hej Tak) // Puisque nous sommes sauvages
In a world of communication and speeches that flow freely, the place left to the sincere word is not so obvious. I can be connected, virtual and physical, with millions of people, but is it enough for loneliness + loneliness to make people less alone? With 750 Facebook friends, who do we write to when we write?
With Puisque nous sommes sauvages I want to explore the very time of the encounter between two individuals. To dilate this moment, to stretch it, in order to question the conditions of its realization. To give to see the difficulties as the pleasure of sharing with the other, its interior and intimate worlds. Telling embarrassment, envy, boredom, emptiness sometimes also, words in the encounter. And to apprehend intimacy as the building space of a micro-community, the birth of a new plurality. Act of resistance against our solitudes.
Puisque nous sommes sauvages is a piece designed for 2 performers investing the mechanisms of the encounter.
With two, they seek how to talk to each other, and hear each other at full volume. They seek to appropriate a space of expression that has not been used before them and in which to make their words resonate. They seek their voice. By the body, by the sounds, by the breath.
They explore a gesture provoked by stuttering, the inability to say, blushing, slip-ups ... It is these tests, these failures, this perseverance in the need to say that will generate the movement. Our research around text and speech as sound material will be woven into the gestural writing of this duet, resonating the "poetic stuttering" of this encounter, the alteration of language caused by the collision between two solitudes.
Simon Capelle & Mélodie Lasselin (Zone Poème) // Barbare
How can we speak, how can we imagine what is no longer there, what is missing, if we are not aware of this emptiness, this absence? Our research elaborates a story in several episodes, performances or representations, involving all European countries in a mythological narrative on love and relationship to the Other. We are creating an ephemeral and nomadic museum of living works, captured in this translation enterprise, always in a state of transformation, with the desire to welcome the passage of spectators, to allow it to see, hear and feel a poetic, political and common Europe.
Our research takes the form of a live show between performance and representation where the spectators are free to stay as long as they wish, as in a museum exhibition. We work with musicians, photographers, visual artists, scenographers to design a space between the museum and the set. A living space with ever-new metamorphoses, where everything is done in the sight of those present to share the translation experience, giving everyone the opportunity to perceive the process necessary for the transformation of episodes.
The first place is our body. We are interpreters of languages, forms, images, texts and sounds. We go to the European places of memory, representation and culture. We collect thoughts, words, differences and then charge the tray to catalyze our memories and emotions. We are always looking for diversity, not to build a succession, an amplifying list, but rather a transformation of energies and perspectives. Each episode decides for itself on its own constitution and is linked to others by the presence of those who live in space at that time.
As performers, our aim is to share in real time, to discover, to experience collectively, to be friends. We ask the question: what translation should we do to live the Europe of tomorrow?
Scheherazade Zambrano (La Malagua) // K( )SA
Scheherazade comes from the water; She was born in Mexico City, a city built on water that moves constantly and reminds us that it is alive and that movement is necessary to find balance.
With K( )SA she throws herself into the void and between flotation and suspension she questions herself: what is supporting us?
The search for the states of gravity between rope and body, between reversed coordinates, constellations at ground level and the liquid subsoil gives rise to another density: what are we (re)hanging on to?
K( )SA is the embodiement of questions about our links to the cosmos and our origins; a survey around the relationship between the body and gravity to look for other possibilities to be, from a change of perspective, a different body arrangement. For this, I rely on experimentation with different materials: water, air and earth.
How the relation between matter and density makes us feel a change in the way of experiencing gravity; or just to be? How does this feeling change our relationship to the environment?
Thinking about the territory on which we are moving and about the situation of the body as a territory leads to the possibility of questioning our borders, geographical - physical and emotional - and to erase the differences between space and place.
Questionning the spatial and temporal landmarks and openning the door to the creation of other spatio-temporal dimensions, to other possible forms of feeling, of embodiement; and why not, to come into being.
PUISQUE NOUS
SOMMES
SAUVAGES
HEJ HEJ TAK
BARBARE
ZONE POEME
K( )SA
LA MALAGUA
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #4
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #4 2020-2021
Eliott Pradot (Collectif des Mues) // Nuit
How does a vanished body move, a body in search of lost sensations, a part of itself that escapes it?
This choreographic solo questions the figure of the shadow as a double body (homologous to a primary body) but nevertheless partial (whose silhouette is only perceived). As an entity oscillating between appearance and disappearance within the nocturnal space, our research probes the components of a shadow-body in relation to this event-driven vagueness of the night within which perception is disturbed by darkness, leaving sense and body to grope. We ask ourselves the question of the process that this shadow must go through if it wishes to "find itself" and really "take shape".
Nuit is conceived in dialogue with a solitary experience of night-time wandering in the public space. It is part of the pursuit of a performative and literary project, daily and in situ, during which what is specific to this environment (human behaviour, lighting arrangements, etc.) is collected through writing as much as the sensations it gives rise to, the place that bodies occupy in it. With the support of sound creators and scenographers, we seek to stage the spatial diffraction that runs through these wanderings within a scenic space capable of metamorphosis. Spatialized sound and light are part of this living space. The spectators will take their place at the heart of this device with the possibility of walking, like other night owls, on the same level as the performance. This research, on the border between performance and performance, is based on a reflection on the anchoring of the experience in the first place and the possible dialogues between this space and the stage.
At the heart of Nuit is the intimate wandering of a body that discovers itself and takes shape in relation to absence and night-time memory.
Julie Botet & Mélanie Favre (Les Sapharides) // Jumelles
Jumelles research starts around two ideas: the cocoon شرنقة and the gestation process. A desire which is born from a meeting with Tunisian women during the International Festival of Feminist Arts in Tunis in 2018, from which we collected audio testimonies, interviews which mark the beginnings of Jumelles.
We wanted to listen to their stories, their lives as women, as little girls, listen to the songs of their mothers, their grandmothers and share them... Jumelles would bear witness to these links between women, created by common moments, feminine pluri-versal moments between France and North Africa.
This performance would welcome the singular, the personal and the intimate. Binoculars would be inspired by individual sensitivities to create a room, a cocoon for us women. We would like to question the notions of connection, sound, solidarity and empathy. Our desire is to walk on the debris of history, to break down the limits and renew the links that are still possible.
Mathieu Calmelet, Octave Courtin & Ludivine Large-Bessette (LAC Project) // Les Souffles
Les Souffles is a choreographic and sound piece created by the collective LAC Project, bringing together choreographer and musician Mathieu Calmelet, sound artist Octave Courtin and visual artist Ludivine Large-Bessette.
Around strange wind sculptures, long stretchers crossing the space, the bodies activate, breathe, contract and abandon themselves. Blows and vibrations of the sculptures-instruments, blows of the performers in video, electrified by a live digital processing via various sensors.
A strange symphony is created, rejecting the boundaries between organic and mechanical, acoustic and digital, between humans and machines. In this playing arena, the public is invited to let itself be carried away by this living organism-machine. It is a plunge into a soundscape, the space of a joyful battle to decompartmentalize bodies and artistic genres.
NUIT
M U E S
JUMELLES
SAPHARIDES
LES SOUFFLES
LAC PROJECT
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #5
HAPPYNEST ARTISTS #5 2021-2022
Lou Chrétien-Février (Collectif l'Eventuel Hérisson Bleu) // Le cheval de la vie
The show is written on stage with eight actors, in addition to myself. It is a light form, a dance, a performance show where the game is at the center.
Le cheval (de la vie) is sick.
He is tired.
We made him eat sleeping pills.
We are going to try to cure him, we are going to become doctors to save our time.
Clearly, this is not good!
We have the feeling of not being able to really be in life. We are sad, we understood that the death of the world was there, in front of us and it reveals to us, like a mirror effect, that we are only halves of ourselves, living dead, zombies.
We want to name this sadness and by doing so, perhaps free ourselves from it a little, expel it from us, from you.
To do this, we will practice a ritual of games against death to bring joy, trance and thus, in the warmth of our shared intimacy, begin to unzombify ourselves.
The game, as a weapon of intimate resistance, facing the collapse, the muzzling of our souls, our fears, as a kick in our solitudes ...
Cécile Morelle (Le Compost) // La Trouée
TROUÉE, feminine noun: A large opening that allows passage or that lets you see.
LA TROUÉE, young woman: returning home and trying to answer the question: why here rather than elsewhere?
La TROUÉE is a project of writing a polyphonic solo, carried by Cécile Morelle. This show is written on the roads, through the exploration of her body inscribing itself in the crossed landscapes, in the heart of the farm buildings. Her grandmother has never left her farm, when she opens her window, she says she is travelling.
LA TROUÉE attempts to give voice to several windows: that of her childhood on the farm, that of the "wives of" farmers, that of a territory. Between documentary theater and narrative theater, the company Le Compost, through this new creation, questions the place of women's bodies and words in the rural environment. It is a postcard, sometimes tragic, sometimes comical, of the farm bodies of these regions of Cultures where Culture is a rare commodity.
LA TROUÉE goes on a trip right next door to her home.
She digs tunnels between her past in a farmhouse and the many other places she discovers through her encounters.
She swallows miles of agricultural words, silences and muddy landscapes.
Here, between the curtains of fog, through the eyepiece, one gaigne* to know what happens elsewhere.
LA TROUÉE opens its window wide and invites the spectator to come and have a look around.
(*) gaigner : to observe
Alejandro Russo (La Malagua) // Etre Autre
Être Autre is a choreographic project that explores the states of the body at work and the sensitive experience of the world of work in order to question the construction of identities and images that we have, of ourselves and of others, through the gestures of work.
What makes a body "adapted" for one job and not for another? How does technique shape our bodies? How can our job shape our subjectivity as well as the image that others have of us?
In this solo, Alejandro questions the place of the body with the intention of putting it back in the center, as a playground and a battleground. A focus on the body in work atmospheres that evolve more and more towards the erasure and withdrawal of physicality.
The initial proposal is to start from the bodily gestures of different work atmospheres in order to explore them outside their original context, their time and rhythm, their objectives; what remains of the work gestures when they are taken out of work?
LE CHEVAL DE LA VIE
L'E.H.B.
LA TROUEE
LE COMPOST
ETRE AUTRE
LA MALAGUA
ARTISTES HAPPYNEST #6
ARTISTES HAPPYNEST #6 2022-2023
Muriel Cocquet (La lune qui gronde) // MARS
MARS is a nocturnal and non-verbal wandering in the public space. It will question the necessity of space conquest and reconnect with the spectacle of the sky from Earth.
Saturated as we are with Thomas Pesquet's appearances, with the "trailers" of the colonization of Mars, with the colossal investments for space armament, it is high time to give voice to the counter-discourses on space.
This is what we propose to do with MARS through a disconcerting, sensory and funny experience.
MARS will propose a journey through installations and performances. We will take the public to the red planet to meet vulnerable astronauts, poets and clowns and their makeshift camp. The conquerors of the past and present, such as Elon Musk, will be summoned to reveal their excesses through satirical performances. Finally, there is nothing like contemplating the sky to remember that the only thing we know about the stars is the light.
Lambert Riquier (Paradoxos) // Olympique
Olympique is a dance-theater performance. It mixes art and sport to create a dialogue on our daily life, in order to reveal the contradictions, the absurdities.
Our choreographic lexicon is composed of all the gestures present in the disciplines of athletics and more widely of the daily life of these athletes. Olympism is the quintessence of performance. In this sense, I wanted to question the injection of performance that governs our daily lives, both in the social and sexual domains.
In the sporting field, the gestures are optimized to produce the best result. This also exists, in my opinion, in our universe with the optimization of our daily life, our travel time, our schedule that I found interesting to explore through movement.
In addition to the dance, the interventions of the commentator allow to obtain this back and forth between these two daily lives in order to create a dialogue between the stage and the spectators.
Olympique, an explosive cross-country race that retraces the path of athletes by drawing on the bodily richness of the Olympic Games to produce an exhilarating, absurd, funny and poetic narrative.
Anna Ten (Seule à plusieurs) // J'ai perdu mon âge en sautant à la corde
J'ai perdu mon âge en sautant à la corde is the final part of a triptych of dance stories. Each of these stories highlights a self-taught dancer who, playing his or her own role, reveals his or her dance dreams and frailties.
After Je suis venu voir les gens danser autour de moi (I came to see people dancing around me), a portrait of Louis, a former C&A executive who falls in love with dance once he retires; after 2020 c'est ma meilleure année (2020 is my best year), a confession on the body, death and femininity by Bertrand, a computer engineer; J'ai perdu mon âge en sautant à la corde (I lost my age while jumping rope), features Josiane, a seventy-year-old self-taught dancer, a modern-day muse who tells us the story of her ever-evolving body, with humor and self-derision.
In the story, past and present intertwine to form an imaginary space where Josiane is a multiple character, at once a shy teacher, an exuberant art lover, and a woman-child guided on stage by her eternal curiosity. The word gives birth to the choreography, we no longer disentangle them.
In a world torn between the diktat of the perfect body and the resurgence of puritanism, J'ai perdu mon âge en sautant à la corde proposes another way of showing bodies: staging their inevitable metamorphosis. It is an ode to old age, to the woman with sagging breasts who emerges from invisibility, who has the strength to reinvent herself with each decade.
MARS
OLYMPIQUE
J'AI PERDU MON ÂGE
ARTISTES HAPPYNEST #7
ARTISTES HAPPYNEST #7 2023-2024
TENIR est une pièce pour une danseuse et un musicien live, puisant son écriture dans la matière du muscle et explorant les représentations de la force.
Quelles relations construisons-nous avec la notion de force ? A quoi et comment décidons-nous de l’employer ?
Sans chercher la virtuosité, mais plutôt le rapport intime aux organes musculaires et à ce qu’ils engagent comme sensations, fictions et désirs, ce solo creuse dans l’imaginaire que le muscle développe. Il s’inspire notamment de pratiques méditatives et magiques, de lectures poétiques (Kae Tempest, Les nouveaux anciens), de connaissances anatomiques et d’histoire de l’art.
Frappée par les récents évènements de violences policières et de répression des corps, cette danse tend vers une digestion du politique où les outils de métamorphoses et de transformation deviennent une nécessité.
TENIR se jouera pour 50 spectateur.trices maximum et celleux ci seront invité.es à s'installer dans un dispositif scénographique construit spécifiquement pour créer une sensation d'intimité, de proximité et d'attention aux détails.
Sacha Bordes (Collectif l'Eventuel Hérisson Bleu) // After After
Ce que je vis transforme les rêves que je fais, mon rapport au monde et donc aux histoires. À celles dont j'ai besoin et celles que je veux raconter. Être trans me reconnecte à une histoire de laquelle je me tenais éloigné. Dont j'avais peur surtout.
Je rêve différemment.
J'aime différemment.
J'entre en relation avec les êtres et les éléments qui m'entourent de manière différente.
Je me bats pour autre chose que correspondre à la société et à ses normes. Cette lutte était, depuis mon enfance, perdue d'avance, et puis j'en ai d'autres à mener et qui m'occupent tout entier.
Je vais vous raconter ce que je vois en rêve.
J'ai envie de vous raconter une histoire pour espérer collectivement à une fin du monde qui serait en fait le début d'un autre. Y contribuer, au moins imaginairement, avec ce que je traverse.
Un récit d'apocalypse et de ce qui se passe une fois la révélation advenue.
Cette histoire commence par une démangeaison...
Forbon N’Zakimuena // Zola… Pas comme Émile !!!
Zola… Pas comme Émile !!! est un spectacle en cours de création imaginé et mené par Forbon N’Zakimuena. Forbon s’intéresse à la question de la naturalisation française d’enfants nés en France de parents étrangers. Forbon fera se rencontrer plusieurs histoires autour de la sienne : celle issue de son propre entretien individuel de naturalisation vécu à ses 13 ans.
Un projet où des liens se tissent entre rap, parcours initiatique et récits de vie en quête de sens et d’affirmation de leur nom face aux concepts d’identité et d’intégration. Une création prévue pour l'automne 2025.
TENIR
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AFTER AFTER
