In this workshop, Lynda Rahal gave a time of research and experimentation around the topics of collaborative and collective process and strategies of performing within performative practice and work. The artist devoted this time to share resources and knowledge, to negotiate and speculate on our time and space.
The invited artists explored different modes of engagement and relational situations through movement, vocal- and/or imagination-based tasks. They had to deal with issues of territories and distribution of space within a group of creation. We will explore a bunch of choreographic games and practices with special care for cultivating alertness to compositional decision- making within a collaborative creative process.
Together they tried to reconsider and reconfigure the proposed frames, investigate specific topics such as spectatorship / leadership / radical togetherness / trust / care / consensus / negotiation / representation / performativity. By proposing a puzzle of speculative practices and work references around the production of collective space, Lynda Rahal worked with them on the matter of how to work within a group, how we produce experiences of being together, how we commit ourselves within a group by using critical tactics and strategies of inhabiting and surviving in unstable performative situations.
Lynda Rahal is an artist working within dance and visual arts. She studied theater, dance and choreography in various institutions : TDMI Lyon, CNR, Ex.e.r. ce/ MA in choreography in Montpellier, program directed by Mathilde Monnier (2011-2013) Art, dance and performance in CCN Belfort and University, and Dance theory in Paris 8 University.
Latitudes Contemporaines is a french festival which unfolds three weeks of shows, performances, concerts and debates in the Lille metropole and around. An international, multidisciplinary, festive and engaged programme! All year long, Latitudes Contemporaines is also a production office which accompanies French and international artists of all disciplines. Latitudes Prod. provides the artists with a custom-made accompaniment for the development of their artistic projects, from their conception to their diffusion. From the end of 2019 and until summer 2021, Latitudes Contemporaines leads the INFRA project, side by side with 5 other European cultural institutions. INFRA – Inclusive Network For Refugee Artists aims to favour the social and professional integration of artists in exile in Europe.
Committed in contemporary creation as a producer and programmer since 1993, Maria-Carmela Mini has supported the apparition of groundbreaking and multidisciplinary choreographic forms in various cities of France, England and Switzerland.
She founded Latitudes Prod., a production office for contemporary performing arts based in Lille, France. In 2003, she created the festival Latitudes Contemporaines, in which she has since then been carrying out the role of artistic director.
David Bobée, artistic director of Theatre du Nord, gave to the artists an insight about what it meant to him to be the head of such an institution, within the prism of his post colonial thinking, working strongly about inclusivity in his programmation. Indeed David Bobée participated in Decoloniser les Arts, a collective which has observed the state of art of employment for minorities in the art field, with a strong focus on performing arts.
With his company, Rictus, David Bobee has, since 1999, been on a path of personal research that blends his approach as a dramatist with dance, circus, video, light and movement. He has also developed collective creations stemming from close collaborations with directors, authors and performers as well as sound, light and video designers.
He has worked alongside Éric Lacascade on: La trilogie Tchekhov, Les sonnets de Shakespeare, Hedda Gabler, Platonov and Les Barbares. In 2008, David Bobee directed Warm, a circus piece performed at la Villette during the 2009 edition of the Des Auteurs, Des Cirques. In 2012 he put on Hamlet at the Subsistances in Lyon – his first creation of a classic work. He then prepared Romeo and Juliet at the Subsistances in September 2012 for the Lyon dance biennial, and Métamorphosis, an adaptation of Ovid’s work, in Moscow (Platform / Théâtre d’art). David Bobee has been associated artist at the Douai / l’Hippodrome National and he’s now the director of Théâtre du Nord, in Lille.
Francois Frimat is a Doctor in Philosophy who teaches in College Courses in Valenciennes. President of festival Latitudes Contemporaines, he is also a member of the redaction comity of La Revue-Cités (PUF). He has been a teacher at Science Po Lille since 2014 and co-directed Alain Buffard, Good boy. in 2014 along with Fanny de Chaillé, Laurent Sebillotte et Cécile Zoonen. He made researches about the evolution of the performing art system, and published them in several books, such as Qu’est-ce que la danse contemporaine ? (What is contemporary dance ? ) in 2011 (PUF). During an afternoon, he shared his knowledge and understanding of the contemporary practices, and how the practices evolved radically during the end of the twentieth century.
the participants of INFRA’s laboratory in Lille had the opportunity to meet an all new scene of performing arts during Latitudes Contemporaines Festival. The cross the practices of Pol Pi, Moya Michael, Strange as Angels and Rachid Ouramdane.
What an intense way back to live performance after one year and a half of covid !
VARIATION(S) by RACHID OURAMDANE
Annie Hanauer and Ruben Sanchez, two exceptional performers who make the intimacy within them palpable by their dance and virtue are inviting us here on a hypnotic journey to the heart of the musicality of their bodies.
First Ruben Sanchez, world-renowned tap dancer, sets his pace with a gesture that breaks the codes of the genre. With force, the dancer takes the freedom of a language that expresses seduction, mysteries, trance and has fun with the standard repertoire of the tap dance. Then he gives way to Annie Hanauer, whose stage presence and sublime dance suspends time and invites contemplation. In a dance that leads us towards a elsewhere perhaps cosmic, Annie Hanauer, shows us the depth of beauty. Like two opposite sides of a Möbius strip, the performers end up creating a choreographic continuum. Musicality as an alchemy of the sensitive.
DATÉ·E·S by POL PI
On stage are three generations, but they coexist there not just to play with these contrasts. Their dialogue projects them beyond. In their gestures, we capture a way of going back, and better revive itself through temporalities. Between her and them, lived experiences intertwine, weave and overturn. From the simple gestures warm-up, it is first and foremost the bodies that show the eras, united by the same visible happiness: that of dancing. It is therefore a pleasure to find alongside Pol Pi, Jean-Christophe Paré, exceptional dancer of the Paris Opera, and discover his four decades younger, Solen Athanassopoulos, who shows a personality and is highly noticed in her acute practice of hip-hop.
Mee too, Galathée by Pol Pi
Allegory of creation or male domination? Brazilian- born choreographer Pol Pi reminds us of all the symbolic violence contained in Ovid’s fable.Behind the artist’s attachment to his work, Galatea’s passivity – which did not even have a name in the original text – is striking. At a time when the most retrograde thoughts are being expressed in the open spaces in Brazil, Galatea is here the starting point for a reflection on the idealization and formatting of the female body through masculine and patriarchal gaze.
CARTE BLANCHE for MOYA MICHAELS in L.A.M.
Moya michael is a south african dancer, performer and choreographer, who has been given the opportunity to produce a work in relation with the exhibition spaces of Lille’s Art Museum, in the frame of Latitudes Contemporaines festival.
Moya is interested in ‘performing the self’ and developing projects with other artists and artistic fields and has an ongoing commitment to process and discourse. She continues to evolve as a creative maker of live performance. It is in this manner that she has established a working relationship with KVS (The Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels) as one of their artists. As a skilled performer, Moya is interested in all forms of expression and identity with the use of mixed mediums.
STRANGE AS ANGELS
Who better than Marc Collin could explore the Cure’s musical labyrinth? The Nouvelle Vague’s head of thought goes there on Strange as Angels, a journey where he transcends the principle of the “cover”, with the help of the splendid ethereal voice of Chrystabell, also David Lynch’s muse. Produced, arranged, and conceived by Marc Collin, this collection of covers of The Cure is skillfully weaved, illuminated in the twilight so dear to the founder of Nouvelle Vague.
