THE NEXT SHOW 不日騷 (One night Live Performance of 3 artist's performance) 16 / 12 / 2018 with Raphaële de Broissia - Philippe Charmes - Frederique Decombe at Floating Projects, Hong kong (venue partner)

Curated by Frederique Decombe

Supported by the HONG KONG ARTS DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL.

PERFORMERS: Raphaële de Broissia, Philippe Charmes, Michelle Cheung, Roy Cheung, Frederique Decombe, Saie Ryu Lee, Lori Lok, Gabriel Ma, Yen Yen Ng, Mehrdad Tahernia, Daryl Walker, Riz Yiu. SCORES: Roy Cheung and Vanissa Law

 

 

“harlequin’s habitus/we are made of a mix of pleasant and detestable traits that make us normal, ultimately. I do not know which anomaly makes my traits insoluble in one another, so like I have the impression that people perceive me as a pot-pourri, a garish and unbearable macedonian salad.” [1]

THE NEXT SHOW 不日騷 allows the audience to witness and ponder on four distinct yet interrelated practices pursuing their own creative logics while putting into relief the other ones: a surrealist live collage of words and movement (Decombe), a sketching operation taking place through extreme dressing/undressing (Charmes), the transformation and personalization of a coat through everyday materials (de Broissia), and the documentation and piecing together of these processes through the intervention of a film camera.

“All of a sudden, silence; seriousness, even gravity, descends on the audience – the king is naked. Discarded, the last screen has just fallen.

Stupefaction! Tattoed, the Emperor of the Moon exhibits a colourfully patterned skin, more a medley of colors than skin. His whole body looks like a fingerprint. Like a painting on a curtain, the tattooing-striated, iridescent, embroidered, damasked, shimmering- is an obstacle to looking, as much as the clothing or the coats that fall to the ground. Let the last veil fall and the secret be revealed; it is as complicated as all the barriers that protected it. Even the Harlequin’s skin belies the unity presumed in what he says, because it, too, is a harlequin’s coat.”[2]

Decombe engages with her chorus of story-tellers/readers/singers through a set of subtle intentional cues as she pushes forward the musicality of word and sentences in ways that turn working with text into a seemingly haphazard but highly evocative mission that could be described as ‘Wordpainting’. By contrast, Charmes displays an ‘Action Drawing’, in which he frantically draws the other performers and cameraman while being dressed and undressed to extreme levels. Over the course of the show, Charmes simultaneously embodies an almost manic dual artist/model role alternating between near-nakedness and Michelin Man-style figure. De Broissia metaphorically paints/crafts her coat with everyday yet unorthodox fabric (balloons anyone?!), realizing a kind a ‘pret-a-porter’ piece through a practice that appears both zen-like and poetic.

In the middle of these three performances, the cameraman captures the ephemerality of the rehearsal process as though it was the work of art itself (and, indeed, it is), creating his own choreography by weaving in and out of each rehearsal and their interconnection. Through its own visual painting, the camera makes itself an irreducible part of the show and invites the audience to reflect on their own position as ‘spectators/voyeurs’ of the intimacy of performances in the making.

[1] l’année blog juillet 2009 – janvier 2011, Costin Nedelcu www.nedelcu.net/journal, Montréal – Luxembourg – Port Louis – Buzàu (our translation).

[2] Serres, Michel (1997), The Troubadour of knowledge, Translated by Faria Glaser, with William Paulson, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, p.xv

Extract from the orientation of a triangle – selves embroideries – the emperors’ new clothes by Francois Mouillot and Damien Charrieras