Performance Day #3

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Emily Mast, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Benjamin Seror, Virginie Yassef, Céline Ahond & OKAYCONFIANCE

For this third Performance Day, La Ferme du Buisson is bringing together a mixed bag of international artists for an exploration of the interstices between the visual and the performing arts. Audience participation performances, an invisible show, a narrative concert, film performances, activated exhibitions and get-togethers model potential futures by delving into norms and hierarchies, radically different ways of being and ventures in communality.

This year the festival invites visitors on a shared jaunt through our various spaces—theatres, studios, exhibition rooms, outdoor venues—in search of hybrid forms of expression embodying unorthodox points of view and modes of perception. Its subtitle is adapted from Ray Bradbury’s Plays for Today, Tomorrow and Beyond Tomorrow. The worlds presented here are singular in the extreme, but their common factor is a projection of imaginative alternatives to the harshness of current social conditions. Each in its own way, these “science fiction” works dismantle the mechanisms—social, political, perceptual, corporal, artistic—that mould us today. In doing so they challenge the theatre’s authoritarian side by redrawing its lines and blurring the boundaries between stage and auditorium, audience and performers, characters and sets, image and action. Here the theatre becomes a terrain for role-playing aimed at rendering spectators self-aware, so that, as Augusto Boal put it, “they can see themselves today and imagine themselves tomorrow.”[1]

Program
2–9pm: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz–video screening, loop, 20 mins
2–9pm: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa–video screening, loop, 50 mins
2pm–midnight: Céline Ahond–Backs to the Wall, Back to the Literal, exhibition and guided tours

2:30pm: Emily Mast–performance, 1 hour; activation by the audience, 30 mins
4pm: Virginie Yassef–show, 40 mins
5pm: Emily Mast–performance with protocol, 1 hour; activation by the audience, 30 mins
6:15pm: Digressions: Virginie Yassef–book launch
7pm: Emily Mast–performance, 1 hour; activation by the audience, 30 mins
7:30pm: Benjamin Seror & The Masks–performance, 1h 20 mins
7pm–midnight: OKAY CONFIANCE–event, 5 hours

Coproducers: Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Playground Festival Leuven (STUK & M-Museum), Grazer Kunstverein

Until July 22: Céline Ahond: Backs to the Wall, Back to the Literal
How to make the oral tangible? How to signal our presences? Exploring the interstices between words and images and breaking out of the frameworks—writing, reading, representation, work, responsibility—Céline Ahond addresses the role of the individual, the relationships between power and territory, the concepts of geographical displacement and uprooting, and the possibility of asserting one’s freedom.

With the backing of InPACT-Initiative Cultural Sharing Fund, the National Foundation for the Graphic and Visual Arts (FNAGP) and the “Culture and Society” programme of the Île-de-France Region Cultural Affairs Office.

[1] Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press, 1979.