Ouvrir la boîte
For Ouvrir la boîte. Regards sur les boîtes chorégraphiques et la documentation en danse, Lise Gagnon invited close to 20 dance practitioners—dancers, choreographers and researchers—to examine the FJPP’s choreographic toolkits from a meta perspective by opening them, interrogating them and unpacking them, in order to view them from different angles and explore their immense potential.
The book begins with a brief description of the origin of the toolkits as imagined by Ginelle Chagnon, and the adventure of putting together this digital collection. Several of the collaborators then engage in a lively discussion fuelled by questions such as: How and why were the toolkits created? Who should document works? Where to find desire and pleasure in documentation? How to imagine an open-ended toolkit?
Ouvrir la boîte then proposes new avenues for reflection on documentation in dance: revealing what the toolkits conceal; questioning the use of video as a documentation tool; imagining other ways to document a work; using the choreographic toolkits in a dance school; displaying them in a museum and imagining their many possible offshoots; and, finally, thinking about choreographic toolkits as a creative tool.
This unique project brought together many participants: Clarisse Bardiot, Lucie Boissinot, Ginelle Chagnon, Danièle Desnoyers, Geneviève Ethier, Lise Gagnon, Lucie Grégoire, Kim Henry, Anne-Laure Jean, Brigitte Kherhervé, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Nasim Lootij, Alexandre Michaan, Sophie Michaud, Katya Montaignac, Josée Plamondon, Isabelle Poirier, Romy Snauwaert and Marie Tissot. Thank you all so much!
La danse de Hanako – Hanako’s Dance
This fanzine invites you to follow the traces of a ghost-like dance. The dance by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines was performed before a select few, and was not filmed or photographed. Yet its sensory content was methodically captured in this multi-authored work.
Spring 2019: Researcher Catherine Lavoie-Marcus gave the impossible yet energizing task of archiving dance in real time, using paper and pencils, to writers Nicholas Dawson, Lise Gagnon, River Halen Guri, Patrick Poulin and Nora Rosenthal; visual artists Clément de Gaulejac, Véronique Lévesque-Pelletier, Christian de Massy and Youloune; and notator Nasim Lootij. The artists followed Hanako in her dance, hurriedly capturing it in words and sketches, like trying to catch a train already in motion.
The fanzine is a collection of all the written traces that came out of this joyful, urgent exercise. It is also proof that dance is inseparable from what it does to us. Here we see how it acts on bodies, pencils, space, memories and inner experience. Dance moves us in every sense. The moment it is shared, dance shatters into a thousand pieces, a thousand subjective impressions. With these traces in hand, we invite you to divine the work, to make it reappear. Through your eyes, Hanako’s dance is continually recreated.
