PRATICABLE

Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad, Odile Seitz
photo: Bruno Pocheron
le site en français


PRESENTATION

PERFORMANCES:

- album

- the beloved

- the breast piece

- dance

- ohne worte

- sensation & imagination: a study

- the stage and myself

CALENDAR

PRESS

BIOs
THE BREAST PIECE (praticable)
Alice Chauchat & Frédéric Gies


"As to nakedness on stage, we thought we had seen it all. But in The Breast Piece, Alice Chauchat & Frédéric Gies renew the gaze and the questions about the body connected to it. Yet Chauchat reveals only her breasts. But, in the style of performance art, she densifies their presence to the extreme. Her tiniest movements—an inflexion, a tonic stress—converge towards her breasts, which focus the tension and irradiate her whole body.Thus they seem to detach themselves from the rest of her person, to vibrate, spread out, disappear, unfold, mark the time, insist. Autonomous, they strip from the common images that lock these attributes of femininity to clichés, from the breastfeeding woman to the trailer calendar bimbo. In that sense, this choreographic act, haloed with a slight smile to a totally offbeat music by Ernest Chausson, is eminently political."
(Gérard Mayen, Danser)


This work focuses on the breasts, both as physiological fact and cultural symbol for femininity. Our interest lays in producing culturally loaded representations of woman out of a concrete physical practice, and through this to question the relation between "natural" body and its cultural representations.
photo: Yves Mettler

Presentation

After having met and begun artistic exchanges through feedback sessions, common practices (in the frame of the project “praticable”) and a collaboration on Frédéric’s last solo, “dance”, we decided to make a piece together, danced by Alice. We have both been working a lot with gender representations, and developed a common interest for initiating choreography from a physical approach to movement's root.
Such an approach focuses on the perception of body systems (skeleton, fluids, organs, etc.), leaving open the form of the resulting movements. Yet the impact of focus is visible and working with shifts provides for a multiple, ever-changing body.  The forms taken on by the moving body reflect textures and intensities, and the signs produced  (i.e. formal appearances) engage us in a complex relation to the activity of the body producing them. To develop a physiological work on the breasts, we worked with Bori Hoppal, a Body-Mind Centering practitioner specialised on the breast area.
The activity of dancing in The breast piece is based on the use of imagination to build an image of a "real" body, creating ambiguous relations to notions of body, gender and reality. The choreography is a set of body images functioning as triggers for movement rather than starting from images of movement. 



Nature / culture

Basing a work on anatomy can be associated to essentialist approaches of the body, whereby social prejudices could be explained by a “truth of the body”. Yet the fluctuating relation between physical focus and resulting images can question these very prejudices; on the one hand, an activity resulting in images detached from expectations towards female representation can show these expectations as “bigger than life”, and thus undermine them. On the other hand, a clear emergence of known symbols can reveal the body’s incorporation of cultural forms and thus free it from its supposedly natural status.
We can then wonder whether our cultural understanding of the body is really close to a “truth” of the body, or inversely, whether the natural body isn’t an unreachable fantasy.



Concept & Choreography : Alice Chauchat & Frédéric Gies.
Dance : Alice Chauchat.
Lights:Rut Waldeyer.
Music : Ernest Chausson, Janis Joplin.
Production manager: Pauline Roussille / Aire
Production : Alice Chauchat / Aire and Frédéric Gies.
Supported by : Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d‘Île-de-France - ministère de la Culture et de la Communication.
Thanks to Tanzfabrik Berlin and TanzWerkstatt Berlin.
Praticable is supported by Fabrik Potsdam in the frame of Tanzplan Potsdam : Artists-in-Residence.