Sylvain Huc: Sujets (2018)
Friday, 22 November at 8:00 p.m.
dance performance, festival opening
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
Duration: 60 min.
There are no simpler and more complex questions in dance art than what is a body and when does a body become someone. In this way, Sylvain Huc has created a remarkable choreographic study of people.
»Seen from a certain angle, these bodies are of four kinds. Firstly those perpetually in motion. Secondly, those who sometimes pause. Thirdly those who short of being driven off never stir from the coign they have won and when driven off pounce on the first free one that offers and freeze again.«
This is an excerpt from Beckett’s short story The Lost Ones (Le Dépeupleur, 1970), quoted by Sylvain Huc as accompanying lines to the performance Sujets, which premiered at the Montpellier Dance Festival in 2018. This particular sample of Beckett’s prose, similarly to several of his other prose works, can be read in the sense of a choreographic partiture – his territorials, unable to turn (back) into time, his abstracts of failed humaneness, his captives of desperate self-narratives – and perhaps simultaneously as the key to enter Huc’s choreography.
Namely, the French word sujet is a bearer of many diverse meanings. It can mean darkness, a story (subject), a reason, an individual, the subject in many humanistic and philosophical concepts, also in French ballet dancing the designation for the role of the soloist, the portrait subject, etc. In the original title, Sylvain Huc wanted to preserve ambiguity, indetermination and the intriguing vagueness of the French denomination, however, due to its Latin root, it is impossible to use a single word to translate it into Slavic languages. Briefly: the performance can be viewed in several ways (or all at once, if we are capable of doing that). Sujets is a drama of the body itself, bodies in interaction and bodily activities: it is a drama of body postures. Although its conjecture seems formal in the dancing sense, we nevertheless watch people onstage, choreographed by the battle with one’s own existence, one’s own future stance. They are driven by a thousand stories, but the Sujets waste no time in telling them. »Opinion is beneath the true and the false, precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. What arises from the truth-process, by contrast, cannot be communicated [ne se communique pas],« wrote Alain Badiou in his essay »Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.« The future Sujets in Huc’s performance are precisely in the midst of the above mentioned process. They are coming towards themselves and others.
Choreography: Sylvain Huc
Performers: Gauthier Autant, Juliana Béjaud, Constant Dourville, Julie Koenig, Paul Warnery
Assistants: Mathilde Olivares, Fabrice Planquette
Lighting and sound design: Fabrice Planquette
Music: Alessandro Cortini
Together with: Gauthier Autant, Juliana Béjaud, Constant Dourville, David Malan, Mathilde Olivares, Daan Vervoort
Photos: Erik Damiano
Created for: Montpellier Danse Festival 2018
Co-production and partners: with the support of Montpellier Danse 2018, creation residency at the Agora, International City of Dance, with the support of the BNP Paribas Foundation, of the Usine National Center for Street Art and Public Space (Tournefeuille / Toulouse Métropole), the Place de la Danse – CDCN Toulouse / Occitanie, the Hivernales CDCN d’Avignon, the Gymnase I CDCN Roubaix – Hauts-de-France, the Sala Hiroshima in Barcelona, the French Institute in Barcelona and the SPEDIDAM.
* This performance features nudity.
Organised by: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia
Supported by:
