Alice Chauchat
Anne Juren

technical rider

tour

press

Presentation

"When we decided to do a project together, the only certainty was our wish to do a “dance performance”. This implied for us, to revisit our common background of institutional dance education in France from the perspective of our present position towards choreographic practice. Thinking around what sort of dance performance we might want to do, we had to realize our interest laid in that very desire, the will to explore what pleasure could be found in the organization and presentation of movements.
We wanted to suggest that this pleasure is created by the dynamic interplay of dancing / being watched dancing / watching dancing.
Indeed, this social relationship is specific to dance performances and creates in this moment an interactive relationship of gaze and presence between both the one watching and the one showing. If the dancer becomes image and the spectator, gaze, the relationship is also always one between people aware of themselves and of the others as subjective entities.

°Interdependent pleasures
The dancers’ pleasure in dancing is infectious (provokes desire to move and produces the kinesthetic experience of sensual sharing).
The audience’s pleasure reinforces that of the dancers by feeding their narcissism, and is necessary to the confidence without which none likes showing oneself.
The dancers’ exhibitionism feeds from the audience’s voyeurism and conversely.
The pleasure in doing a particular movement involves an intellectual satisfaction related to what it evokes, represents.
For example the pleasure in producing a « seductive » image, the humorous play with given images and their connotations. The dancers project what the audience’s pleasure can be as it projects what the dancers’ can be.

°Social relationship between showers and watchers
We wanted to affirm the generous potential of dance performances, which lies in the immediate relation between the experiences of dancers and spectators. We wanted to stress this back-and-forth movement between sensations and thoughts of each, which are nourished by what is projected onto the other side.
There is a link to study between the dancers’ pleasure and that of the audience, which doesn’t lay in projection only but as well in the interpersonal relation, e.g. seduction. Both phenomena constitute an important part of the happiness about taking part in a dance performance, an affirmation of what human exchange can be on a generous base, an economy of attention framed by desire and gift: an audience giving time and focus and performers offering a proposal to be shared."

Alice Chauchat and Anne Juren