'How people live and what they do to one another are at the root of the wide range of work of the experimental French choreographer Maguy Marin. "I don't recognize myself in this world that is being made for us with its market economy, media, consumerism and varieties of increasingly complex oppressions, one of which is identified with war," she has said. "I am not a fanatic, but I don't accept this world as it is."
'That Marin is a politically committed artist is not in doubt. She was part of a hunger strike by French arts personalities to protest the massacre of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995. The daughter of anti-Franco exiles from Spain who settled in Toulouse, France, where she was born in 1951, she has included a social critique even in opera-scale productions like her familiar and spectacular doll-house version of Cinderella for the Lyon Opera Ballet. But from the time her own modern dance troupe made its United States debut at the American Dance Festival (the 20th anniversary was recalled at the Scripps Award) with May B, a piece inspired by Beckett, Ms. Marin has never let her deep interest in movement exploration dim her concern with how people live and what they do to one another.
'Unlike American choreographers she does not work with a signature idiom but explores a new vocabulary to fit each piece. Unlike Pina Bausch, to whom she has been misleadingly compared, she does not use realistic images to suggest the universal. Instead she makes the generic or archetypal look specific. Marin has produced such diverse works as the popular Cendrillon; May B, a tribute to Samuel Beckett, and the biblical Lecons des Tenebres, choreographed for the Paris Opera Ballet, and Babel Babel, in which dancers performed nude. Miss Marin has often said her ideas come from painting, film, television and the street. While some pieces are gaudy, with brilliant cinematic action, others have a somber, painterly look and measured movement.
'For Marin, dance, which questions premises, is a challenge to the establishment. "The stage is part of the world, not a place for entertainment," she has said. "Artists need to take responsibility, to confront horror and violence through independent thought. Dance is inscribed in the present, and as violence increases and liberty lessens, dance challenges us to work for the idea of freedom."' -- collaged
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Stills
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Further
Compagnie Maguy Marin
Maguy Marin Bio (in English)
Select articles on Maguy Marin in English
Documentary: 'MAGUY MARIN: WORDS ON DANCE'
'Maguy Marin, trente ans de règne'
Video: Maguy Marin on Samuel Beckett (in French)
'A Bleak World : Theatrical Nihilism From Maguy Marin'
'Compagnie Maguy Marin: Moving Days'
'Maguy Marin envoie valser les médias'
'Rencontre avec Maguy Marin'
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Extras
Maguy Marin interviewed in English
Maguy Marin interviewed (in French)
'MAGUY MARIN LE PARI DE LA RENCONTRE'
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Maguy Marin Interview
from paris-art.com
Entre le processus mis en œuvre au début des répétitions et la pièce dans sa forme aboutie, beaucoup d'éléments ont-ils changé?
Maguy Marin: Par rapport à la manière dont la pièce est née au départ, cest-à-dire de façon très organique, je suis assez étonnée de sa forme finale. Imperceptiblement, à force de tâtonnements, les différents éléments se sont mis en place. Les choses se décident au fur à mesure, se construisent intuitivement. Je ne pars jamais avec une vision globale de la pièce.
Où situez-vous Description d'un combat dans votre parcours?
Cette pièce poursuit la démarche que j'ai menée depuis ces dernières années. Avec du recul, je pense que c'est assez logique qu'elle ait cette tête là, puisque qu'elle s'inscrit dans la continuité des projets comme Umwelt ou Turba. Dans description d'un combat, on retrouve par exemple le fait de s'appuyer sur un texte en particulier et de ne pas en sortir ; l'envie de creuser une seule et même chose sans qu'il ne se passe d'évènements majeurs entre le début et la fin, au risque d'ailleurs d'être un peu lancinante avec ça.
Comment se passe la rencontre avec un texte? Comment retranscrivez-vous, avec vos propres outils, une œuvre littéraire?
C'est d'abord une rencontre musicale. Un texte m'accroche parce qu'il est avant tout mélodique mais aussi parce que des images, des réflexions ou des pensées émergent du texte comme des éclairs. La phase de lecture est une expérience très importante.
Au regard des textes choisis dans vos spectacles, vous semblez porter un intérêt tout particulier aux mythes, ceux de tradition biblique dans des pièces comme Eden ou Babel Babel ou bien antique, avec Lucrèce pour Turba et maintenant Homère pour Description d'un combat. Qu'est-ce que cela évoque pour vous?
J'ai un rapport très fort à la tradition, à l'histoire. J'aime les choses qui traversent les âges et j'essaye de comprendre les raisons de cette pérennité dans le temps (malheureusement souvent, ce ne sont pas pour de bonnes raisons). En tous cas, les mythes m'intéressent dans la mesure où je peux les ramener à des préoccupations contemporaines, à la vie que je mène et qui m'entoure.
Je pense que les mythes sont avant tout des histoires humaines qui existent depuis toujours et qui se répètent indéfiniment. Le conte de Cendrillon par exemple a été écrit par tous les peuples. Il y a des thèmes comme ça qui travaillent les humains où qu'ils soient dans le monde, des histoires qui se transmettent de générations en générations, de culture en culture ; le mythe dit un peu de ces choses universelles et c'est en cela qu'il me touche.
Comment en êtes-vous venue à cette dimension plus théâtrale, à travers l'utilisation du texte notamment?
Quand on me demande comment est apparu le texte dans mon travail, je réponds qu'il m'a fallu trente ans pour y arriver. J'associe la période d'apprentissage de ma compagnie à celle des trois premières années de la vie d'un bébé que je découpe par tranches de dix ans.
La première année, le bébé commence à gazouiller, à découvrir les sons produits par la voix et le mouvement des lèvres puis, il se rend compte de l'utilité de nommer les choses pour obtenir ce qu'il veut et finalement, petit à petit, il apprend à faire des phrases pour exprimer ses pensées. Avec la compagnie, nous avons passé plus de dix ans à travailler avec la voix et le corps sans jamais vraiment utiliser du texte.
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10 works
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May B(1981)
'May B, an homage to the playwright Samuel Beckett, is deliberately tied to Beckett's themes - and like her model, she pulls no punches. Her characters can be as nasty and bitter as his. The tour de force is that Miss Marin does not exploit Beckett's material but treats it ingeniously through another dimension - dance. This is dance conveyed along new definitions but it is still dance. Only a choreographer could have created May B and perhaps only Miss Marin could have realized that Beckett's famous silences should be conveyed by sound. Since dancers are usually wordless, Miss Marin has made her Beckett characters spew out fragments of sound - sometimes unintelligible and sometimes not. Clad in ill-fitting night clothes, they trudge their alienated way in unison - remarkably precise in every movement - toward self-discovery. Sex is what they discover early on in a manic twitching sequence, but we also see them register an increasing range of emotions - hostility, fear and tenderness.'-- NYT
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Cendrillon(1985)
'Created in 1985 at the Ballet de l'Opéra de Lyon, Maguy Marin’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) has become as famous and mythical as May B (1981), the French choreographer’s Beckettian masterpiece. The show has traveled the world from Scandinavia to Australia via Latin America, notching up nearly 500 performances. Under the auspices of designer Montserrat Casanova, this centrepiece of his contemporary repertoire looks like a doll's house on stage, with the dancers made otherwordly by fabulous scenery, flashy costumes and childlike masks. Against a set design based on wooden horses, Maguy Marin unleashes a harmonious, fragile and minimalist choreography: Prokofiev's classic ballet as you’ve never seen it before.'-- Time Out
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Eden(1986)
'Eden gives us dancers who only look nude. Actually, they are in fleshlike leotards with painted genitals and breasts. With one or two exceptions, all the words and music recorded on tape in this 110-minute piece are played backward. So if you have never heard Maria Callas in reverse or are curious to hear how British rock groups and Turkish folk-song ensembles sound when their tapes are rewound, here is your chance. The astonishing aspect of Miss Marin's work is that nothing is a gimmick - these are tricks but they serve a justified artistic purpose. The sound becomes a haunting textured aural wall, superbly suited to creating an aura of alienation. The simulated nudity on dancers who wear masks becomes, comparably, a symbol of mankind in, yes, its naked state. The absence of literalism creates a distance that mythologizes.'-- NYT
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Groosland(1989)
'Groosland, commissioned by the Dutch National Ballet, is for 18 fat people. Actually, 18 dancers in fat suits. In Groosland the dancers enter piled on carts and are propped up like rag dolls. The music is Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos Nos. 2 and 3, of all things. When the dancers begin moving, they look like characters from Marcel Pagnol’s Fanny film trilogy: comfortably bulging working-class stereotypes from the south of France, with dark-blue overalls and frumpy blue frocks and too-small blue porkpie hats. Later they strip down to “nudity,” still wearing, of course, their flesh-colored fat suits. Such carryings-on are wildly incorrect, politically speaking, and there is indeed a disturbing undercurrent. But Ms. Marin’s ability to blend queasiness with joy is pretty remarkable.'-- Ballet Magazine
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Points de fuite(2001)
'A bare stage, screaming guitars, flocking dancers, "Don't talk to me about what you are saying…. I'm not asking you what you are saying," - all without intermission. French post-modernist Maguy Marin frustrates. No doubt, people leave Points de fuite befuddled and shaking their heads murmuring, "What WAS that?" Going to see Compagnie Maguy Marin is not like attending your usual entertainment and many Americans may find Marin's work pretentious and boring, unused, as we are, to intellectual gauntlets in our mainstream arts. Underneath its stripped-down appearance, however, Points de fuite is rich and thought provoking, but you're going to have to bring your imagination, your intellect and a fair amount of socio-political awareness to the party. Points de fuite is not about amusing anyone, but challenging them.'-- critical dance.com
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Les applaudissements ne se mangent pas(2002)
'Les applaudissements, which takes its inspiration from a book by Uruguayan poet Edward Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America, aims to show a more complex picture of Latin America. For Marin, the solid shades of both the curtain and the ordinary street clothes worn by the dancers, invoke conventional thinking about the vibrant energy of the region. Meanwhile, the movement vocabulary is bound by themes of confrontation and tension. Dancers stare down and circle each other, walk past, and run away. They lunge, resist, support, and throw down. One recurring phrase has dancers literally bumping chests in a display of machismo power. In its very pedestrian-ness—walking, running, stopping, falling—Marin aims our gaze at repetition and the daily grind.'-- Brooklyn Rail
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Umwelt(2004)
'In Maguy Marin’s Umwelt dancers appear and disappear through a slatted set. We see them, for a few moments at a time, in the midst of performing mundane and sometimes unusual tasks. Nine performers move in and out of our awareness and we get glimpses of solitary and communal lives. They move in unison while visually separated by vertical openings in the set. Three appear and take big bites out of apples. Two put on crowns. Four button shirts. A few scratch. They put on doctors' coats. Eat carrots. Carry trash. Wipe their noses. Pull their pants up. Hold a baby. Kiss. Fight. Carry a naked and lifeless body across their shoulders. One spool of rope on the right side of the stage unwinds towards another spool on the left. It is a constant marker of time. Unceasing air from very high-powered fans blows on the dancers the entire time. The ongoing sound of the wind and the score is abrasive and driving.'-- Reflections on Dance
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Ha! Ha!(2006)
'Ha! Ha!, a new work by Maguy Marin, places seven performers behind music stands at the front of a dimly lighted stage filled with seated life-size dummies. The performers begin to laugh hysterically and to tell jokes; occasionally a brick crashes down, smashing a dummy and its chair to the ground. That's it: there is no dance in the piece. But Ms. Marin asks important questions here about why we go to the theater and what we expect when we are there. Kudos to her dancers, who scream with laughter from a meticulously written score for an hour before themselves crashing to the ground.'-- NYT
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Turba(2007)
'Turba designates a multitude, a huge population, confusion and tumult. With her new creation, Maguy Marin borrows from the writings of the philosopher and Latin poet Lucretius (On the nature of things) and totally immerses her eleven dancers in the turbulence of the crowds. In Turba the sense of nightmare is something we have to go back to Virgil to encounter it so forcefully - I find her genius inescapable for this and this only - and then in the second part she employs references to Velasquez's Las Meninas, arguably inspired by Foucault's reading, but in a way that transcends her theoretical model: in fact she seems to suggest that Velasquez is Ulysses' ultimate embodiment. This makes one's head spin.'-- collaged
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Salves(2010)
'“We must organize pessimism,” repeats Maguy Marin after Walter Benjamin and adds: “We must give life to forces of resistance.” As much as Maguy Marin’s artistic creed might demand creative freedom, it furthermore dictates ethical consciousness. An artist who knows precisely what she wants to say with her performances and how to voice it physically, Marin’s works reveal themselves as essential. They are frescos/epic poems on contemporaneity that, to the artist, shows itself as a field of ruins, the ravages of 20th century collective catastrophes. A nightmare and a personal apocalyptic vision, Salves enthrals with its artistic intensity.'-- Cankarjev dom
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p.s. Hey. Still sick. Sickness has decided it particularly hates my lungs and throat as of this morning, and it's not too crazy about my brain either. Same warning, etc. re: yesterday's p.s. applies again today. This could be a slightly better p.s., or it could be kind of quite shitty like yesterday's. Hard to tell. Let's find out. ** Misanthrope, Mine is sort of a normal shitty sickness, I think. I hardly ever get actually sick, so I don't have much to compare it to. I don't think I'm going to die, I don't think. Of course now that you mentioned that, I'll start thinking I am probably. Are you 100% again, man? Hoping so. ** Lee, Hey. I'll take your comradeship in poor health, thank you, but at such a cost to you, so heal thyself, man. I'll be okay. You cracked 'IJ'! Sick and all. Well, there's volume and then there's volume. That's good volume, as opposed to ... I can't think of any bad huge books right now. There has to be millions of them though. Best to you, man. ** A white fiction resumes its punctuality, Hi. I probably should have taken the day off, but I'm, I don't know, a workaholic maybe? Something. Oh, those are kind words, thank you. No, by my standards, I doubt I've ever written anything that's fit to clean the boots of Ashbery's worst thing, but he's probably my favorite living writer. I understand how difficult it would be to work with determinedly code-breaking scholars. For me, I don't think trying to decode Ashbery is the way to go. I prefer to read him like I take a drug and let the pleasure remain complicated or something. Sorry, I shouldn't try to think when I'm sick. Love, me. ** James, Thank you, man, I'll do my best. Will definitely try to avoid an ER visit. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David. Oh, dinner with Ken Weaver, nice. Very sad about Ray Collins. Great singer. I saw The Mothers with him singing a few times. I don't know if you know/knew the queer writer/ publisher Larry Mitchell or his work, but he just died too. ** Cobaltfram, Thanks, John. Hoping for a big breakthrough by tomorrow. ** 5STRINGS, Yeah, it was awesome, thank you! That's weird: I made a list of things Sade didn't think of, or write down at least, too. Alt Lit ... I don't know, a renaissance of really good new writers from all over the place sometimes doing some real innovative stuff. I'm rapt. 12 hours! You poor thing. Being sick always makes me horny. It's weird, it's evil. ** xTx, Hey! I got the eBook, thank you! I love your piece! I read through most of the eBook very foggily, but, yeah, there's some real good stuff in there. Hooray for all of us! Definitely trying to figure out how this sickness's ass can be kicked. Yury says bee pollen, so I'm eating that. Wow, that stuff is vile. Stay completely healthy! ** Sypha, Nice. $100 isn't cheap, but, yeah. I remember that scene in 'What About Bob', ha ha. The Dec. 31st cut-off thing seems like a good idea, yeah. You feeling better? ** Alan, Thanks, yeah, I want to see 'DU' as soon as I'm on my feet again. ** Flit, Whoa, you have totally figured out how to befuddle my illness-smashed brain because I couldn't figure out what you were saying at all, wow. That was cool. I liked the words and the string that you made of them. Maybe tomorrow I'll go back and figure it out. ** Allesfliesst, They're a good reason to visit at that time. Plus, really, Paris is never more physically beautiful than in December. Yeah, Cheever has never done a thing for me, but I haven't even tried him in many years. He was beloved of a lot of 'gay writers' back in the 'gay lit' boom days whose work I really wasn't into at all, so that didn't help, I guess. Neoclassic story telling is okay in and of itself. Not my thing, it's true, but I guess that word 'classic' wouldn't be there if there wasn't something to it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Glad your Xmas is going so well, man. I love that comic you put up on Facebook yesterday. You did that, right? It's awesome. And 'Man in Bed Asleep' is totally beautiful. A kind of perfect, sublime thing. Truly. Everyone, look at 'Man in Bed Asleep', a drawing that _B_A made when he was about 3 years-old. It's dreamy, and it's here. Thank you, Ben! ** Billy Lloyd, I'm going to hold you to both of those promises. Don't forget. I don't make food myself, but I'll buy you some special, secret French food delights in return. I'm glad you're better. Not me, ugh, but so it goes. Yeah, It's Yury with a 'y' at the end. People here and elsewhere often misspell it with an 'i' at the end, I don't know why. Wow, seriously, about painting yourself gold? That's such a good idea. Leave a breathing spot or whatever. Is that true, though? That you can suffocate if you don't leave a blank spot on your body when you paint your body? Probably not. I read that Rilke book when I was a wee thing aspiring to be a poet, so, yes, I do know what you mean, 'cos it was inspiring to me too. Sweet. Thanks, B! ** Steevee, Wow, that was a serious flu you had there. Hopefully mine will just die any hour/day now, but, sure, I'll go to the doc if it stays bad or gets worse. Thank you. ** Postitbreakup, Santa was good. Is good. Still being eaten. It's big. The Santa relief face thing in the bottom drawer is/was the best part of all. Whoa. Thank you for the good wishes. I'm still saving 'Fecal Matters' 'cos my brain is still no good. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Ugh, sorry to hear about the family stuff you went through. I was happy to be far from mine. Avoidance should definitely be killed off. I have avoidance issues myself. Sucks. And if people like the first chapter, you should def. take that as green light. Go! ** Bill, Hi. Heck, every other line of Ashbery's could well be about sex. 'Dark Shadows'? That really sucked, no? I thought so. The lowest of his lows. The plane-provided fodder sounds kind of good though. You're already there. And you don't sound jet lagged. How can that be? Yury does violently hate depictions of Russia/ Russians in old American/ English films, yes. It's a topic that I've learned not to broach with him. Thanks, Bill. ** Rewritedept, Yep, still ill. Thanks about the posts/books. All terrific, those three. Sure, of course, I would be way into doing a blog post/intro day, yes! Whenever, man, just say the word. I'll try to get better by tomorrow. I'm determined. ** Okay. I'll leave you alone now and concentrate on being vastly improved by tomorrow. Uh, the post ... I think I said a while back that I want to start doing more posts about theater/dance here since that's an area that I work in but rarely feature on the blog for no good reason. So, the very interesting and influential -- and a big fave of Gisele's -- Maguy Marin is a start. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.