Spine Of Desire: Wounds without tears, out of one skin in diamonds and shit is the name of the artistic research that French-Carribean artist Stanley Ollivier and his collaborator French-Malian dancer Mamadou Wague undertook for their two weeks IN CONNECTION residency at HAUT in Denmark.
The choreographic research dives into what intimacy, safe spaces and community building among other things can look like in dance. This project is part of HAUT’s long term collaboration with workspacebrussels – laboratory for research, experiment & creation in the performing arts. This text is a part of the collaboration between HAUT and bastard.blog. A collaboration where they try to find new ways of documenting artistic research and work methods
As I’m writing this text, I find myself facing several paradoxes:
1. I’m supposed to write a text about a piece, that tries to escape from being intellectualized. A piece that at its core seems to be concerned with something else. That in Stanley Ollivier’s own words is not so much about theory, but more about experiencing something. That is about finding back to the joy of creating, about forming a community, and making a space that consists of affects instead of concepts.
2. I’m trying to describe a piece, that inevitably will have many references I don’t have access to, drawing inspiration from certain cultural references, POC spaces and dance histories I might not know. At the same time, hearing Ollivier speak at Haut’s “An Hour With…” about being instrumentalized as a minorized artist and institutions expecting a certain kind of (tragic) story from you, and a stereotypical representation of your identity, as a queer artist myself I recognize those dynamics in my own professional life, albeit different. I will approach with curiosity and carefulness, and the knowledge that I will have access to some things, while other things will get lost on me, and that I will represent a certain type of audience with my situated knowledge (and unawareness).
3. I’m writing a text about a piece dealing with rest and care, while being really exhausted and overworked myself. (This can either be a good thing or a bad thing for the text.)
I feel an urge to work against my impulses, because my impulse is always to grab my notebook, to study, to find interesting references and quotes, to make clever analyses as the ‘good student’ I am. But I feel like maybe this is not what the work needs. I try to allow for a permeability in myself and the text. I try to remember to have fun. I try to be patient.
I let my words find a comfortable space to rest for a while
like this spot
or over here seems nice.
zzzZzz zzz zzz
zzzz zZzz
zZzz zzz z
After a little while I wake them up.
“I have a plan,” I tell them. If you could all just form a line of thought. Or a train if you like.
I trust my most organized group of words to make a transcript of the performance.
I look at my more clumsy words and ask them to write out how I felt during the piece, some different associations (but not too intellectual!) and images.
Then I look at my ‘good student’ words and tell them that they can write their quotes if they insist, but that they will have to do it in the footnotes. The footnotes are an intimate space to inhabit. It’s like a whisper. Like a shy academic in the end of the page, that can only communicate in namedropping.
attempt at a
TRANSCRIPT
M and S are sitting in each their corner of the room, lighting up the corners with flashlights while talking.
I recall school camps in primary school
staying up late at night in our bunk beds
playing with flashlights in the dark, pointing them to the ceiling
as they ran back and forth
you had to touch each other’s lights
M and S start whispering to each other in the dark.
They are discussing something.
I think about kids fighting
I think about love, concern, violence
I think about the paradox of being angry at someone because you care about them
M and S go silent, and the room gets completely dark.
It’s dark for a really long time.
If it wasn’t the beginning of the piece I would think it was the end.
My eyes try to get used to the dark
I begin seeing shapes, real and unreal, flickering before my eyes
Some of the windows open and the room slowly gets lit.
A soundscape starts playing.
Some kind of noise
… Is it the sound of waves?
M is standing up and S is lying down on the floor.
Their elbows start moving slowly.
I think about the geometry of elbows
elbows making shapes
( ( [ (( C C
{ { {{ [ ((
(( CC
circling
More windows open.
It feels like the performers are getting ready for something
‘greasing’ up their limbs
another sound enters the soundscape
beep beep
a bit like the sound of the radar of a ship, scanning the depths of the ocean
S slowly gets on his legs.
M and S move closer to each other.
They get as close to each other as they can without touching.
they seem to affect each other with their movements,
( like ripples in the ocean ? )
(( ((( (( )) ))) ))
M and S move away from each other.
M is touching the wall.
It’s like he is smearing the wall in something
S is touching the floor.
“Dance is to be occupied with something,” I think as I watch them touching the surfaces
M keeps touching the wall and his neck.
Is M trying to rub something off his skin? And put it on the wall?
the boundaries between wall and skin dissolve
rubbing smearing cleaning
an endless cleansing
neck —– wall —– neck —– wall —– neck —– …
S is lying down on the floor and sleeping.[1]
it looks nice z Z ZZzz M looks at the audience and starts moving back and forth towards them in small steps. it feels a bit threatening … or maybe threatening is the wrong word determined? ready? wanting a response? M open his arms and points them toward the audience with open palms. are we being offered something? … the thing that he has cleansed himself of? M picks up a megaphone and sings into it: If tomorrow… The megaphone repeats: If tomorrow… If tomorrow… If tomorrow… I think about the futures about waiting for something, hoping for something[2] There is something both sorrowful and hopeful in the singing S is still sleeping. if tomorrow … we can sleep if tomorrow … we can be safe if tomorrow … we can meet if tomorrow … we can – Up tempo music starts playing. something with drums and flute (I wish I could say the genre, but I’m not sure) (Afterwards Stanley tells me that: ” it was a music by Magguy Faraux from the LP Danse Ti Doudou (Bal et carnaval des Antilles), the name was Tambours de carnaval. As the name says it, it’s an ode to the carnaval in the Caribbean. “) S gets up and walks back and forth between two walls in a quick tempo. the image of ‘getting ready’ comes to mind again resting, recharging being supported and then > leaping The walking turns into a dance. The walking was already a dance. S removes invisible sweat from their forehead. as Stanley walks back and forth in the space I think: ‘getting to work’ but also physically mapping out the space with your feet the distance from here to here Making space[3] I think of standing at parties, watching other people dance, trying to get ready to join After a while M joins the dance. They dance back and forth from wall to wall. Then they stop. Applause. Just as they’re about to ‘begin’ it ends and we’re left with an image of the dance they prepared for the rest … and then the ecstacy. The work. The walk. The party. The dance. I try to collect my words in one group again. I think about the different feelings and images I am left with from the work. Blindness. Anger. Care. Being held. Holding space. Sleeping. Getting ready. Moving. Walking. Working. Waiting. Sorrow. Joy. Hope. I started writing the text with several paradoxes. I look at the title of the work again and see how it is also full of contrasts and contradicting movements. Spine Of Desire: Wounds without tears, out of one skin in diamonds and shit. It is like a movement through different feelings and textures. And then the contradictory “wounds without tears”. What do they look like? Is it a simple suppression of pain? Or is it something else, some space between hurt and hopefulness? I’m left with a list of new contradictory questions: How to make a work that connects joy and pain? How to create a safer space inside the (inherently?) unsafe institution? How to acknowledge the structures and forget the structures? How to imagine other worlds using the words and movements that are so shaped by this one? How to insist on the untranslatable while making yourself understandable? How to rest but also make work? I put the questions on paper. I let the images of the performance linger. this spot right here looks perfect z zz zZZZz zzzZZZzzzzzzZZz Z ZZZzz z About this residency [1] “We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.” ― Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022) [2] “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.” ― José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) [3] “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” – James Baldwin in a letter to Sol Stein (1957)
M leans against the wall and follows S with his eyes, while moving a bit to the music.
I let my words rest again.Concept, Artistic Direction: Stanley Ollivier
Choreography/Performance: Mamadou Wague, Lily Brieu Nguyen, Stanley Ollivier
Music: Villads Klint
Costumes: Godwin Agossah
Scenography: Lou Cocody-Valentino
Artistic Assistant: Audrey Merilus
Production: Hiros
With the residency support of: Workspacebrussels, Gouvernment Gent, Le Bamp, TanzHaus Zürich IN CONNECTION is HAUT’s residency format that gives Danish performing artists the opportunity of a residency with one of HAUT’s international partners. The format is shaped in response to the artist’s and the project’s needs. The residency is aimed at Denmark-based artists interested in working internationally and for international artists interested in working in Denmark.
Stanley Ollivier and his collaborator Mamadou Wague were invited into a two week IN CONNECTION residency at HAUT in Denmark with the artistic project ‘Spine of Desire: Wounds without tears out of one skin in diamonds and shit’. This opportunity blossomed out of HAUT’s long term collaboration with workspacebrussels – laboratory for research, experiment & creation in the performing arts. The two organisations also provide the danish-based artists Sall Lam Toro, suziethecockroach and Keiria Hissabu two weeks of residency at workspacebrussels this spring to work on their artistic project “BODY TONGUES: TECHNO_RAGE”.
This residency is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the Bikuben Foundation and the Municipality of Copenhagen.