Anne Lise Le Gac

“The performances I write generally start from a physical and mental experience, lived within a well-defined space-time. I use this event to create a new one, a situation in retrospect. During my training at CNDC in Angers in 2013, I wrote what is called a ‘memoir’ (the quotation marks are because the term still bothers me) on the possibility of a VERNACULAR PERFORMANCE. It was about questioning the terrains in which I live and those I traverse as fertile places, filled with juice and brimming with nourishment.

That remains one of my main questions today.

Reading anthropological and sociological essays (by Tim Ingold or Loïc Wacquant, for example) leads me to observe—often through participation—the practices of Others and the different modes of thought associated with them.

This is how I ended up spending a summer in Canada with a group of builders, the Mudgirls, who taught me the gestures and principles of natural construction. More recently, I worked on the set of a film by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita, set during the University of Happiness, the annual gathering of European Raelians, hosted that year in a countryside spa hotel in Croatia.

Each of these situations inevitably raises multiple questions for me on topics as vast as happiness, ecology, piracy, or coaching. These experiences generate conversations, and they often become the groundwork for new research. From there, materials emerge and expand for composition. There is no limit to the heterogeneity of their formats—stories, dances, video, rap, images, sculptures, music—and how they are freely interwoven.

Writing and performing could be compared to a living organism in which relationships emerge and become keys to accessing an environment that is deeply unstable and polysemic.

It takes the form of a drift on a map scattered with practices and readings, with which I play in order to never stop learning by doing.”

— Anne Lise Le Gac

The core of the project takes shape around an unofficial practice: The DUCTUS.

In his book A Brief History of Lines, Tim Ingold defines DUCTUS as follows: in the Middle Ages, this word referred to a mode of reading that followed a TRAJECTORY rather than a PLAN. “They did not interpret the text written on the page according to a precise plan, already composed and complete in itself, but rather saw it as a journey marked by signals, direction signs, or milestones that allowed them to navigate within the space of memory.”

For some time now, contemporary maps or plans have erased traces of practices—as if the structure of the map derived from the structure of the world. Ingold points out that the journeys of inhabitants are erased from the map, just as the voices of the past are eliminated from the printed text. This, he argues, is how writing became dissociated from music, leading to its disappearance.

DUCTUS guides a team of practitioners in developing a TRAJECTORY, interwoven with practices and lived, ongoing, and imagined histories (drawing on the philosopher Averroes’ (12th century) vision of fantasy). The goal is to write this piece as a SPEAKING MAP, in which four figures/characters interact. From their encounters, their situations will lead to the production of hybrid gestures: narratives of practices, acoustic images, tool dances, edible chronicles, and sporting music.

DUCTUS is a concert of trajectories, dances in conversation, a dinner of memories, with the objective of staging that THING that guides us in the path of composition. The team consists of four “travelers” with diverse profiles, arranged according to a set of functions, tasks, and activated positions.

This project will take the form of a choreographic and performative piece of approximately 80 minutes, with its creation scheduled for May 2019.

Anne Lise Le Gac lives in Marseille. She studied at the Fine Arts School in Strasbourg from 2003 to 2008, focusing on performance art. She completed the ESSAIS master programme for dance at CNDC Angers in 2013. In 2014, she worked with choreographer Claudia Triozzi. Anne Lise Le Gac has also created solo pieces such as La Caresse du Coma and a collaborative performance project, GRAND MAL, with Élie Ortis, which they presented at the Les Urbaines festival (Lausanne), at Festival Parallèle (Marseille) and at the TQW reopening weekend.
Since 2015, she has been co-organising the performance festival OKAY CONFIANCE that was recently held at La Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel).
In July 2018, in residency at Centrale Fies (IT), she starts a new performance project in collaboration with the artist and musician Arthur Chambry. This creation will be presented in spring 2019.

Arthur Chambry lives and works in Marseille. In 2014 he founded Cindys Tapes, an alternative music label with which he produces several international musicians. His musical projects, which he also releases on this platform, often solicit other mediums : for example Storyboard and his second Album-video released in 2016. Since 2016 he transposes his practice in a performative context, he builds his own instruments and plays his electronic compositions. In 2018 he plays Circo Gelatino in collaboration with Loto Retina and Gauthier Chambry at the Ferme du Buisson in Paris and Arsenic Theater in Lausanne during the festival Les Urbaines.