Alice Chauchat & Alix Eynaudi

presentation

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Presentation

CRYSTALLL scintillates as a jewel in a showcase.
CRYSTALLL is about decoration and beautification as formalistic strategies.
CRYSTALLL is a research on the glorification of the (female) body within conventional representations.
Dance, dancer, lights and set are precious, decorative, exotic, objects.
CRYSTALLL is a solo for a female dancer.
Between attraction for aesthetic experience and rejection of an admirative position, CRYSTALLL proposes, without comment, contemplation as a critical experience.


CRYSTALLL problematises the ornamental function of performance.
We call performance's "ornamental function" its formal dimension, its capacity to give visual pleasure in itself, without any other discursive aim than defining aesthetics through its formal properties (ornament then appears as non-useful, freed from representative roles).
The "spectacular function" is its backside, the ability to bewitch, through which a performance can absorb its audience.
The spectacular ornament, without describing another idea than its own being, then implements an aesthetic experience without a link to an absent object.
Crystalll is a spectacular ornament that implements critique, not of the stage object but of its perception.
We want to produce a double movement for the spectator:
- attraction, fascination for spectacularity
- auto-realisation, awareness and wonderment for this state
Both movements are implemented by recognisable representations of beauty, and provoke the audience to criticize their own gaze more than the representations themselves. We're interested in a critical relation that stirs up doubt between conceptions and experience.
CRYSTALLL creates a conflict that doesn’t ask for a single solution.
CRYSTALLL offers itself to a continuous practice of merging and distancing with/from a spectacular moment.


Crystalll was originally created as a black box performance, referring directly to the history of stage representations of female bodies, and using light effects to emphasize the magical appearance of an "unreachable being”.
The white cube version invests more on the position of the dancer-as-object, proposing a similar perspective on the sculptures and the dancer. The spectator is invited to observe images, situations, and one’s own expectations towards beauty, femininity, and a dancer that becomes an object of aesthetic satisfaction.
Shifting the performance to the exhibition space brings about the spectacular expectations towards art, let them be plastic or choreographic; Crystalll reveals modes of enhancing mystery, producing awe, in the meantime as using them in an effective way.