Double bill:
L’Épouse & La Ménagère

Info

L’Épouse / The Wife
 

Concept and choreography: Rebecca Journo (FR)
Music: Claire M Singer – The Molendinar – composed and performed by Claire M Singer, published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music
Supported by: Danse Dense, Collectif 12
Proiect susținut de Région Île-de-France prin programul FoRTE – Fonds régional pour les talents émergent
Duration: 25 minute

This solo places self-representation in the center of a revisited wedding march. Inspired by the world of dolls, L’Épouse / The Wife seeks beyond reality, in our fantasies and nightmares. The solo speaks of a character whose language is only the body, who tries to communicate in pursuit of transformation and the ability to become another. On the edge between performance art and a staged piece, this approach brings the desire to touch, to involve the interlocutor who discovers this mechanized and alienated body.

La Ménagère / The Housekeeper

Concept and choreography: Rebecca Journo (FR)
With: Rebecca Journo, Mathieu Bonnafous
Music: Mathieu Bonnafous
Costumes: Alya Derris
Lights: Iris Julienne, Florentin Crouzet-Nico
Exterior eye: Raphaëlle Latini, Tomeo Verges
Supported by: Aerowaves, Région îl-de-France through the FoRTE- Fonds régional pour les talents émergents program, Danse Dense, Atelier Medicis, Collectif 12
Duration: 50 minute

Pixelation. Temporary interruptions and errors. We’ve all experienced an unexpected explosion of jagged, pixelated, hallucinatory lines spread across computer screens. A digital error fractures the image we are looking at and, for a frustrating moment, interrupts the movie, game, or photo we are watching. Before returning to normal, everything turns into pieces that short-circuit the visual plane and, in a way, call into question the forms and traditions. But what happens when digital techniques meet performance and intersect with the concreteness of body matter?

In a space with black and white tiles, which reminds us of a kitchen, stands a woman, a housewife, dressed in a yellow overcoat. The sounds of a sponge scratching and a vacuum cleaner, compose the alienating soundtrack of the piece. The dialogue between movement and sound unlock the inner world of the character. Quoting the author Sheila Rowbotham in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, La Ménagère explores the “neurosis of nothingness” as an outcome of the women’s lock down into a dissolving cyclical process, filling up to emptiness.

La Ménagère is the second part of Rebecca Journo’s diptych L’Épouse & La Ménagère, two solo pieces that portray archetypal feminine figures to raise questions about the space in between fantasies, performance and the so-called reality. As in glitch art, the obsolescence of such representations inspires the choreographic language to search for the ‘system error’.