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From Etienne Souriau's "L'ombre de Dieu" to Mats Ek's shadow of Carmen

par Courtois, Fleur
Référence International Symposium "Speculative Art Histories" (mai 2013: Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam/ Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam)
Publication Non publié, 2013

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Classical ballet has often been considered as a counter-model by contemporary dance. The stereotype of classical ballet arranges a regime of “illustration”, with its tutus, its romantic grace, its coordination of the corps de ballet, its standard expressivity derived from classical tragedy and comedy, or its aproblematic correspondence between music and dance at rhythmic and emotional levels. On the other hand, modern and contemporary dance has slowly dismantled that rhetorical regime of the “sursignificant gesture”, leading to a pure, abstract dance which is emancipated of its dependence to music, theatre or narrative. Nevertheless, Mats Ek turns back to classical ballet. He doesn’t do so by an absurd disfiguration or by a (today sacralised) purifying abstraction; he fulfils it until he reaches an antique although timeless excess. In Carmen, first staged in 1992, a game with humoristic levels leads him, in fine, to tackle classical ballet’s codes and aesthetics at face value. This hijacking is not a subversive turnaround. On the contrary, it makes the passionate chorus between music, dance and theatre only stronger. On the basis of an extract from Mats Ek’s Carmen, I will determine two contemporary ways to apprehend what a choreographic setting up (instauration) could be. On the one hand, I will show how today’s typical, aesthetical paradigms applied to contemporary dance unwillingly lead to a form of censorship regarding the dramatization of bodies and characters. Admittedly, defining dance as the most abstract art (Michel Guérin) or as an event freed from all kinds of representation (Gilles Deleuze) is quite seductive at first. But in a second time, these definitions clash with bodily material boundaries (Geisha Fontaine) and with situated knowledges (Georges Didi-Huberman) which are required to obtain a specifically choreographic staging. On the other hand, the way Mats Ek revives dramatization process can help us to explore another path to choreographic instauration. While acknowledging the aesthetical paradigm of contemporary dance, how could we play again with a dancing dramatization, without falling in the trap of the classical regime of illustration? How to make strong characters as Carmen dance, how to have them invested by moving powers without condemning them to be the mere supports of a cathartic representation?French philosopher Etienne Souriau will help us to tackle these issues which are at stake in Mats Ek’s Carmen. In his book L’ombre de Dieu (“The Shadow of God”, 1955), loving beings are set up through Nietzsche’s dramatic formula: “If I love you, does it concern you?” (The Gay Science, §141). Between an always uncertain amorous reciprocity and the wishes we have for it, we have to experience a mediation, which must be shaped beyond the one we love. More than our loved one, it is its capacity to mediate the shadow of love that we must invigorate – while this capacity is always in danger of dying in indifference. How does Mats Ek make dance the indifferent shadow of Carmen?