REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES)

vincent roumagnac

REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES) An Ecotonal Doctoral Piece in 40 Scènes, 15 Parergonal Writings and 5 Double-Postcards. From the perspective of mise-en-scène (staging), and correlatively that of the place and the practice of the metteur-en-scène (theatre director), this artistic research project addresses, examines and experiments on the question of the scenic/scenographic representation of a postnatural world, in climate transition, affected by global warming and moved by abstract data-flows, in a tangled web of storms, information, and algorithms. While lived and conceptual "time", no longer telically given as linear and chronological, is being anthropodecentered and, therefore, diffracted into an open plurality, the Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses) artistic research project takes the earlier notion of time as a raw material to reexamine, from an eco-scenic and research perspective, in order to transform the theatrical practice of its author and to trigger the latter’s specific contribution to artistic research milieu. By obliquely playing on one hand with memories of theatrical history of scenic internal modi operandi, architecture, and literature, and on the other hand with institutional requirements for doctoral research appearance, the project aims at repositioning the director's practice in a movement of transition of scenic thinking and imaginary through a series of artistic and research experiments, whose enactments and resonant redistribution are poetically at interpretative play in this exposition.

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On our photoscenic pieces

Aurélie Pétrel: For seven years we have been collaboratively designing installations with protocol of reactivations and photoscenic pieces that interact with their exhibition environment, while questioning public visibility conventions, both spatial and temporal, of the works.

Vincent Roumagnac: Every piece we make keeps on moving and transforming in the context of its exhibition (gallery/museum or theatre). It constantly evolves from latent stasis to redistributive movements in the space, according to the successive re-assemblages of the photographic objects and other materials that constitute them…

Aurélie: This results in time-troubled hybrid installations, a mix of still images and performative sculptures in perpetual motion that question both of our respective mediums, i.e. photography and theatre.

Vincent: Like the changing - translucent, reflective or even diffracting - surfaces of the raw materials that Aurélie imports from her solo into the pair's work, in order to create the photographic objects that circulate in our installations, the presence of the exhibited piece is questioned according to a principle of instability and hesitation.

Aurélie: Echoing Jose Muñoz’s queer statement in the intro of Cruising Utopia - «The here and now is a prison house» - our work, in its tangential dynamic invites the spectator to witness unstable displays that prevent a unitary and totalizing seizing of the piece «in presence» ... We thus drift away from the closure of a unique series of photographs hung on a wall or a unitary, rehearsed and more or less repeatable theatre piece poured on a framed stage.

Vincent: ... we propose instead a diffraction of the approach through a plural and deviant spectatorial experience... an experience of the in-betweens, the gaps, the spacing, the leaking into other times, already gone or still to come...

Aurélie: ... taking the risk, playful and, or, absurd...

Vincent: ... pleasurable, or frustrating...

Aurélie: ... of “missing” it.

(a pause)

Vincent: We have engaged our dialogue on the potentialities of deferral. It has been forming through the encounter between Aurélie’s research on photography via notions such as «latent image», photographic -"scores" or photographic "tracing/tracks" ...

Aurélie: and Vincent’s deconstruction of the conventional reduction and closure of the “scenic” to a - say «straight» - metaphysics of presence and live act through his research on «theatre chronotopias» and «deepening the stage» ...

(a pause)

Aurélie: Our photoscenic pieces take as a starting point literary and theatre material. So far we have worked on Shakespeare, Borges, and Euripides. In the third piece that we are going to make at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, we will work with feminist technoqueer science-fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin).

Vincent: The experiment with those pieces resides in the fact that we never perform those theatre works (the "live" part) in front of an audience as a «show», but instead, we collect photographic traces of the various rehearsals/performances in situ, in order to re-stage the work, in a deferred way, in the exhibition space or in a theatre ...

Aurélie: ... re-staging it by unfolding it otherwise, in the absence of the interpreters of the text, of its logical, conventional, embodiment, but within the spectral persistence of the scenes, the choreographic games and other performative gestures, as well as the preparations and the «afters», all the ritualistic components of “making-theatre”.

Vincent: The working method is always the same: we first isolate ourselves in a chosen location for a residency: so far we have worked on an island in Finland, in a crumbling 13th-century monastery in Alentejo-Portugal and, soon, we will be working at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto.

Aurélie:... during the solstice in Finland, in the middle of the hot summer in Portugal and in the winter in Japan...

Vincent: ... the different seasons' qualities and colors matter in our works …

Aurélie: On the spot we edit, rehearse and perform the «theatre piece», based on the study of the chosen texts... together with visiting collaborators like Finnish choreographer-performer Simo Kellokumpu, or Swiss mask-artist and performer Nagi Gianni.

Vincent: All the pictures printed on the heterogeneous elements of the installation are shot by Aurélie during the period of the different research-creation residency in relation to the specific geographies where each residency takes place. Through the pair's work, Aurélie expands through variations her solo research on the question of the plasticity of an image, its fractal potential, not only in itself but also in what it can provoke as a disturbance, and therefore an extension, of perception.

Aurélie: From his solo explorations on the revision of the production of theatre from a reset scenic ecology, Vincent imports his research on the opening of the agency of the «backstage», of the elements of set for example, beyond their primary decorative function. And by expanding a theatre emerging from non-human agency ... the idea of a centrifugal dynamic of the stage, that implies the removal of the anthropogenic control to the margin ... reckoning a decentering of the gesture of mise-en-scène...and hospitality to non-human temporalities.

Vincent: The matters and the objects in our pieces are withdrawn, reserved... the images are cut, absorbed, curled, altered... these unstable cloudy set and regime of composition speculate on a new orientation in the contingent scenic relation between time, object, image, artist, and spectator. A novel "théâtre d'objets" maybe, informed by contemporary trends such as new materialism and object-oriented-ontology.

Aurélie: When it comes to the visitor-spectator, we encourage them to return. This notion of a returning (revenant) audience is not only constitutive, like the permutation of scenic agencies between the (human) stage and the (nonhuman) backstage, of Vincent’s “chronotopian theatre” …

Vincent: ... but it is also embedded in the logic of the situated redistribution of the photography implemented by Aurélie in her solo work.

Aurélie: We invite the “returning-visitor” to take care of a temporal relationship with the piece, which is itself layered by the simultaneity of several temporalities, that question the structure, the duration, the repetition, and the fragmentation of the representation, and of the attention.

Vincent: In relation to the socially constructed, linear, punctual, intensified time of the theatrical performance or of the event-exhibition, our photoscenic pieces offer an incomplete, inevitably missing but open narrative, through the potential and cyclical reorganization of its traces, fragments, and signs.

Aurélie: Thus, together possibly dissociated, artists, spectators, images and objects exchange the same question within this ghostdramatic theatre: when did, does, or will the piece take place? The same question that underlies the entire transdisciplinary and transtemporal project of the duo, from the beginning of our artistic collaboration.

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