Forest of arms and legs – Newspaper Kommersant No. 222 (7423) dated 11/30/2022

In Paris, at the Autumn Festival, the premiere of the dance performance “Foret” (“Forest”) staged by the famous Belgian Anna Teresa De Kersmaeker together with the young French choreographer Nemo Fluure took place. The performers are young people from the Rosas troupe. The scene is the empty alleys of the Louvre at night. Wandered in the forest of pictures and bodies Maria Sidelnikova.

The autumn festival is jubilee this year. For half a century now, every autumn (which from year to year drags on until January, or even longer), he sets the theatrical agenda in Paris. However, its geography is also expanding, covering all the nearest sub-Paris. Genres also mutate. Their borders become more conventional with each release, there is more and more interdisciplinarity in the most daring forms in the program, and the drama theater, once the pillar of the festival, seems to have finally lost its positions in favor of dance and its derivatives. And here patrons have played their role. French luxury giants, led by passionate balletomanes Van Cleef & Arpels, who now have a whole fund to support Dance Reflexions, are eager to encourage everything that moves. Paris has not known such excitement around contemporary dance, perhaps, since the first dance wave that swept the French capital in the late 1970s. From the past, but this time American, the fashion for going to dance in museums and other non-stage venues like churches, hospitals and industrial zones has returned. The main characters of the current Autumn Festival – Peeping Tom, Gisele Vienne, Alessandro Schiarroni, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Noe Soulier, Anna Teresa De Kersmaeker – happily dispensed with the fourth wall, or at least without the stage as such.

The Foret performance, the long-awaited premiere of the festival, starts from the street. Entering the Louvre without a queue is already unusual. Further more. The deserted alleys of the museum lead to the main staircase of Daru, on which there is not a soul, only Nika of Samothrace waves a restored wing from above. Here the roads diverge: to the left – to the French romantics, to the right – to the Italian Renaissance. Where to go and what to see? Everyone chooses his own route, which runs through the halls of the Denon wing, the main treasury of painting in the Louvre. In performances in situ, provoked by the place, and immersive performances, there are no directives, the action here appears as if by itself along the way. With their simple name, the creators of the performance (De Kersmaeker as a curator and mentor, Nemo Flure, yesterday’s graduate of her PARTS school, as a generator of modern ideas) hint: go and get lost.

At first glance, this all looks like a continuation of the Izoizolyatsiya flash mob, when the whole world, quarantined alone with social networks, played “living pictures” based on famous museum paintings. Here is David’s “Death of Marat”, and here in front of him is Marat in the flesh, reproduced up to the crease on the sheet: thin-skinned Tessa Hal on the same face as the “friend of the people”. Here David is waving at Goliath at Daniele da Volterra, and right there on the floor lies a defeated warrior (textured by Rafa Galdino). Here is the “Soul” of Pierre Paul Prudhon bursting into the sky with all her bare breasts, and next to her is the same, except perhaps without wings, spiritualized Margarida Ramalet. Gradually, the paintings and their counterparts begin to come to life. Someone imitates movement – its presence was the main factor in the selection of paintings. For example, in a revived company of Florentines (a group portrait of Giotto, Donatello, Antonio Manetti, Paolo Uccello and Filippo Brunelleschi, where an unknown author wrote everything from different angles), the handwriting of Anna Teresa De Kersmacker is recognizable, when in motion everything is calculated right down to the look, verified and coordinated with body. Here the alphabet of her language, decomposed into syllables, is read instantly.

The scenes in the hall with English portraits also look like a pass to the choreographic kitchen. For example, the curly-haired boy from the Reynolds painting points with his straight hand somewhere into the distance, but the dancer picks up his gesture and famously spins it into the classic De Kersmacker combination, compiled according to dot-graphs and brought to automatism. This is how a dance is born from a static picture. From such dialogues with paintings of varying degrees of success (often the matter is limited to external similarity or improvisation on the theme of the depicted), eleven artists spin their performance for a good two hours.

His rhythm builds imperceptibly. The initial intimacy and harmony gradually disappear. The dance strokes are getting bigger, the routes are getting tighter, the plots are getting more aggressive. “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix, “The Raft of the Medusa” by Géricault, “Paradise Lost” by Martin – mass scenes seem to come off these paintings and crash into the crowd. The music that this character-observer carries around the halls in the columns also stops. It is replaced by wolf howls and cries of artists who have huddled together in a flock for the finale: people are the most terrible predators. The Belgian, the Queen’s favorite choreographer, inscribes the political and social in her performances pointwise, but very aptly. Some viewers never reach the climax, those who are more savvy, on the contrary, are just in time for the denouement. Immediately, De Kersmaker herself begins to flicker in the crowd. Incognito, she conducts her young dance orchestra, demanding more fury from them. Lined up in front of Veronese’s Marriage at Cana of Galilee, the dancers thrash their discarded capes so that alarms go off. And only Mona Lisa is imperturbable and motionless. For once, no one looks at her.