Le Corps du Théâtre : in search of the body

The Le Corps du Théâtre festival at Les Brigittines aims to highlight the fact that a striking number of people in the performing arts – whether dancers, actors, or those involved in performance art – use the body as the most important, or indeed sometimes the only conveyor of meaning, often at the expense of the word. Roubignoles is a fine example.

A word or two of lexical explanation, however, is called for before we say any more about this show. “Roubignoles” means, more or less, “Balls”. It’s a term, in other words, for testicles, but a comical linguistic kink has resulted in the word’s own gender (its “sex”, if you like) being feminine. Look up “roubignoles” in a French dictionary and you will indeed see it described as “féminin pluriel”. And that “feminine plural” caught the eye of the duo made up of Emilie Maquest and Anne-Laure Lamarque, who reckoned it would make a suitable light-hearted title for their show’s investigation of the transforming, hybrid body. “A friend of ours observed, moreover, that Roubignoles was a good title for a project that it takes balls to see through successfully,” laughs Emilie Maquest. Maquest is a Brussels actress and is a member of the Mariedl company that the directors Selma Alaoui and Coline Struyf also belong to. While Struyf’s Balistique terminale was being produced at the Théâtre National, Maquest got to know Anne-Laure Lamarque, a French dancer who specialises in Japanese butoh. So Roubignoles took shape at the crossroads between dance and theatre. Wordless, but showing cabaret influences. Says Lamarque: “Over the last few years we had noticed a renewed interest in burlesque, which we wanted to explore in our own way. And cabaret struck us as a good form to take as our starting point. We have adopted its structure: sequences succeed each other and showing the body is the thread running through the whole show.”

The long version
Does that body have to be the female body? Maquest: “It was maybe first and foremost because we are two women and the basis is a personal investigation. But the more ideas you develop and incorporate into a narrative, the more you find yourself in the domain of the universal. More generally, we deal with the representation of the body in our society. What is shown and what isn’t? What does that mean? To what extent does a body represent someone’s identity, if at all?” Lamarque: “We also look at the mix of identities that each of us has inside. We cannot be reduced to a single image or identity. That finds expression, for example, in the associations we make or the hybrid forms we come up with. And it’s not just about the male aspect that can be found in a woman’s body and vice versa. We also go in search, for example, of the specific animal that lives in us. That results in aberrant and perhaps somewhat terrifying images, but the show is playful for the most part.”

That hybrid, mutating body is contrasted with the bonsai body. What’s that? Lamarque: “The bonsai body is the body that is conditioned by everyday reflexes and habits. Even in its form and posture. As if it had been pruned to keep it in check. In the iconography of the female body, you can see how in the past the female body was actually literally constricted. We want to see what happens if you don’t prune or constrict.” Maquest: “We spent a lot of time working on the costumes, together with Claire Fara. Originally, by the way, burlesque dancers – and butoh dancers too – made their own costumes. The music also plays an important role: we chose a number of pieces of music and the sound artist Gilles Mortiaux added a number of compositions. And finally, we also want to make the most of the space in each venue where we perform Roubignoles. At Les Brigittines we are performing the long version, but we can also adapt the show to the space and the time available, in a gallery for example, or as support act for a concert.”

Roubignoles 14 & 19/3, 19.00, 20/3, 20.30



BODY COUNT
For the Le Corps du Théâtre festival, Patrick Bonté, the artistic director of Les Brigittines, has brought together a number of performing artists who have already shown an interest in the body and the image as the key instruments for getting their message across. As in Emilie Maquest and Anne-Laure Lamarque’s cabaret-like Roubignoles. Lucile Charnier’s show, Bolero (13 and 14 March), in which she appears herself, deploys thirteen extras and live music by Elsa Guénot to present a series of lively tableaux vivants in which a female body is a constantly recurring element. The identity of that body, however, turns out to be unclear and changeable. For her Quatuor à corps (13 and 14 March), Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski draws inspiration from the “quartet” – a four-strong ensemble that we know from music, but which she introduces into the theatre, as four bodies seek harmony and unity in the sum of their individual contributions. Von Wantoch Rekowski is also represented, for the very last time, by her award-winning A-Ronne II, which draws on Renaissance music and painting, as well as on world literature (21 March). The festival ends with a double bill featuring Oriane Varak’s Notch and Isabella Soupart’s After Words (18 and 19 March). In her first solo show, the choreographer and performer Varak, backed up by Guillaume Le Boisselier’s electronic music, shows the body of a fanatical but anonymous orator in action. The Brussels actress, choreographer, and director Soupart has come up with a live sequel to her film Words, in which two performers (Bérengère Bodin and François Brice) and a musician (Jo Mahieu) present a theatrical documentary in which philosophy, dance, and video art meet up and the boundaries between characters and situations become blurred. For each show, there will be an encounter with the artists (on one evening only, when the show is staged twice).


LE CORPS DU THÉÂTRE • 13 > 21/3, LES BRIGITTINES, Korte Brigittinenstraat/Petite rue des Brigittines, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-213.86.10, www.brigittines.be