With TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER Claire Dessimoz continues her artistic practice, between the body, theatre, politics, contemporary art and new forms of writing. In her two precedent performance projects, created between 2016 and 2018, the choreographer and dancer developed a practice of dissociation between the body and speech, composing with evocative gestures related to socio-cultural baggage and personal audio-recordings or those issuing from socio-political investigations. This project is particularly focused on the body and movement, which form the centre of the research.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER focuses on what the body can express more compellingly than any other medium. The piece is a kind of choreographic research that imposes the constraint of holding off on hasty associations between the body and movement and other mediums, so as not to fall into the easy translation into movement of something that could just as easily be expressed through words, images, music, etc. This axis of research incites the principal performers – as well as other dancers invited to contribute to the choreographic study – to propose in turn a sequence of actions and movements that are neither pre-defined nor discussed, leaving the other the possibility of their own reception and reiteration of what they’ve received without ever verbalising or contemplating the propositions with words. Thanks to this exercise, certain elements permit the identification and analysis of the movements’ communicative potential.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER proposes an assortment of short, scattered scenes that highlight a precise problematic with each apparition. This research has resulted in about 50 “living tableaux” or “communicative modules”. Contrary to a demonstration that unfolds in a linear manner, these scattered scenes may be considered separately.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER mixes the succession of very precise tableaux with the stream of perpetual movement from which they emerge. Each of the “communicative modules” are linked through a kind of “naïve dance”, a reference to what Slovakian choreographer Martin Kilvady describes as a first and necessary step towards a spontaneous beginning of movement that justifies the passage from a social body to a dancing body, and further, permits the subsequent development of more conscious and complex movement. This circular “naïve dance” serves to integrate the modules in a less austere way than if they would appear alone. It also underlines the possibility for the coexistence of all the tableaux, in spite of their oppositions, within a single and same movement, traversal, duration.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER is quadrifrontal and close to a museum piece. On a circular, almost bare stage that is simply lit, TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER gives as much room as possible to the body, without artifice. This object also seeks to be very close to the audience, in the hope that they may regard the space in which the action unfurls globally.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER utilizes the feminine subjectivities of its protagonists implicitly without treating the feminine condition in particular. The research involved in this piece does in effect touch upon the potentials of observation and expression on the part of a female research team and yet goes beyond a reflection that uniquely concerns the condition of women, in order to open up to the world and its many dimensions more generally.
TRAVERSER TOUT ENTIER is the first instalment of a cycle that was followed by CURRENT CURRENTS.
