14 October 2010

11 Entr’Actes/Cécile Broché

14 octobre, 2010

Cécile Broché, a recent arrival at Cité, called my apartment a few weeks ago to ask where the Open Studio was that I had advertised as open “24/7, Tout le Temps”… I explained to her that is existed in virtual space only, on my site web, and that I was not making my apartment available for visitors all day and night. (I’m not that kind of man?) That got us off on the right foot with lots of laughter, and we decided to meet for lunch a few days later. Over sushi, we spoke of our work—she with solo violin, often electronically enhanced, and with a kind of  sound assemblage for which she was in Paris to “harvest” sounds of the city (visit her MySpace site) -- and me as a videodanseur. We agreed to meet in a Micadanses studio for a session to “see what happened”--

11 Entr’Actes is a rendering on video of the first fruits of our improvisatory exchange in the studio. Taken from three distinct “crossings” (Sometimes we would begin from opposite sides, other times I’d join her side, and we’d just wing it re. who entered or exited and when…) I looked at the footage and, in the end, decided to splice each of the three “takes” at each point along the way that we’d both cleared the frame. I then shuffled these 11 segments of A-C and arranged them as ABCACACBCCA.

Why the title? Well, the work consists of “acts” or interactions between the two of us. It also references the tradition in vaudeville, theater or musical revues of entertainers whose job it is to keep the audience awake and amused during scene changes that are taking place behind the closed curtain. The seminal American choreographer, Doris Humphrey, in “The Art of Making Dances”, identifies that strip across the front of the stage (almost in the audience’s lap) as precisely that: a marking of time or transition, usually brief and read left to right in Western culture, letting the audience in on a joke or a more informal, less profound kind of entertainment.

Cécile has given me a CD of her work and we will meet again in her studio next week to check out her more techno “wired” side. And now, introducing 11 Entr’Actes!