(LA)HORDE, Ballet national de Marseille
Life’s a Beach
Curated by (LA)HORDE
In partnership with CCN Ballet national de Marseille
Screening at the Petit Plateau, Thursday August 25, from 2 pm to 5 pm
Rerun from 5 pm to 8 pm
With (LA)HORDE, Charles Atlas, Geumhyung Jeong, François Pain
Free access
Life’s a Beach
Charles Atlas, From An Island Summer, 1983-84
Geumhyung Jeong, Trailer for Geumhyung Jeong Delivery Service, 2020
(LA)HORDE, Bondy, 2017
Geumhyung Jeong, Munbangu(stationery), 2011
Geumhyung Jeong, RECORD STOP PLAY, 2011
François Pain, Tanaka Min La Borde (1986) Tokyo (2000), 2008-2021
Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham, Channels/Inserts, 1982
(LA)HORDE
Since 2013, (LA)HORDE brings together the artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel.
This collective of choreographers and visual artists, who took on the direction of the Ballet national de Marseille in 2019, has always developed a collaborative project with several online communities that has given rise to several multidisciplinary and cross-community creations. Through films and performances (Novaciéries, 2015; The Master’s Tools, 2017; Cultes, 2019 ; Ghosts, 2021), and choreographic pieces (Night Owl, 2016 ; To Da Bone, 2017; Marry Me in Bassiani, 2019; Room With A View, 2020), (LA)HORDE interrogates the political component of dance and maps diverse choreographic forms of popular uprising, transitioning from raves to traditional dances, as well as jumpstyle.
Their exploration of the new dynamics of circulation and representation of dance and body that develop online led them to work on the concept of “post-internet dances”. By diversifying formats, (LA)HORDE questions the almost infinite serendipity that this new territory provides and proposes multiple perspectives on the uprisings of the communities with whom they work in a heterarchical way.
Created with the artist Rone, Room With A View is their first choreographic piece with the Ballet national de Marseille, composed of twenty-seven dancers of sixteen nationalities. The following year, they also invited for a mixed program choreographers Lucinda Childs, Tania Carvalho, Lasseindra Ninja and Oona Doherty – each embodying their own iconic, inclusive and engaged conception of dance.
In 2022, they present Roommates, a programme of six short pieces connecting hyperrealism and minimalism, by Lucinda Childs, Claude Brumachon and Benjamin Lamarche, Peeping Tom, Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, (LA)HORDE, as well as a large-scale dance exhibition, We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon, which mixes the register of musicals and live-action films with that of the choreographic avant-garde.
Charles Atlas, From An Island Summer, 1983-84
13’04, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
Atlas’ exuberantly hip homage to a specific time and place — New York, August 1983 — is a dance “home movie,” a quasi-documentary that follows choreographer Karole Armitage and her dancers along the boardwalk of Coney Island and through the streets of Times Square. Atlas’ energetic hand-held camera finds dance in the visual cacophony of Coney Island’s flashy signs and swirling rides, and in Times Square’s neon blaze. He spontaneously choreographs the lights and rhythms of these “islands” to samba and punk-inspired music; the virtuosic editing is a dance in itself. Atlas’ witty “docu-narrative” format, Armitage’s exhilarating choreography, and the vibrantly tacky visual milieu vigorously capture the garish, streetwise magic of a New York summer.
Choreography: Karole Armitage. Director of Photography: Paul Gibson. Music: Henry Fiol, Rabbie Burns and his Ticket Touts.
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Geumhyung Jeong, Trailer for Geumhyung Jeong Delivery Service, 2020
23’22, color, sound, HD video
With Geumhyung Jeong, Soonwoo Kwon, Junghyun Kim, Kanghyuk Lee, GIM IKHYUN Supported by Seoul Museum of Art in Korea
In 2020, Geumhyung Jeong and her collaborators launched Geumhyung Jeong Delivery Service 2020 in which they “deliver” the Delivery Service to the participants who ordered the service to their home address. Geumhyung Jeong Delivery Service 2020 offered options to choose the service scenarios regarding physical distancing and activity level of the role to play how to receive the service. The participants had to perform their role of “service recipient” according to the scenario they chose when “the delivery service team” arrived at their home address. Visiting the website to order the service option was the beginning of their play. This video Trailer for Geumhyung Jeong Delivery Service shares the moments of the journey created together with each participant and Jeong’s delivery team – the photographer and the filmmaker joined not only for shooting documentations but also for the action of the shooting as performers following the scenario.
(LA)HORDE, Bondy, 2017
15’53, color, sound, HD video
The city of Bondy and the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin tasked (LA)HORDE with producing a choreographic portrait of Bondy’s residents. The aim was to go out and meet people who dance but have not necessarily gone through any kind of dance institution, and invite them to film themselves dancing, directing themselves as they dance in venues of their choice. Fifty or so people took part in the project, including a local team of cheerleaders, dance-lovers in the local community centre’s club of the third age, and even swimmers from the synchronised swimming club.
The film was made as part of the local project run by the town of Bondy with the arts and culture department, in partnership with the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin and supported by the Department of Seine- Saint-Denis.
Geumhyung Jeong, Munbangu(Stationery), 2011
5’57, color, sound, HD video
Geumhyung Jeong uses everyday objects upon which she bestows a strange, disconcerting life through an intense and risky interaction. Her movie “Munbangu(Stationery)” produces the desire to become one of these objects, a pencil or a brush or a piece of paper. “The video work Munbangu (stationary) demonstrates this uncanny valley of erasure in an unveiling, personified drawing space, displacing the subject-object experience. Speaking through physical enactments enables her to perform as characters depicting otherworldly interlocutors. Humor acts as a familiar and digestible control variable through which Jeong pushes the strict forms of perception.” -from exhibition text “Who’s speaking” by Klemm’s, Berlin
Geumhyung Jeong, RECORD STOP PLAY, 2011
8’04, color, sound, HD video
A double game between animating the object that films and the actual animation. The lines blur between who is manipulating, who is recording and who is (re)playing. The viewer has to (re) negotiate the usual perception of limits or differences. “This video revolves around the interplay and superimpositions between a filmed animated object and the pictures produced by the object itself: the head of a doll that is pulled over a camera on a tripod, with the lens popping out of one of the doll’s eyeholes. Again and again a third party appears in the mix: the artist interacting with the object and the camera. Set to rhythm by the whirr of the camera, the film oscillates between the various visual and temporal planes of recording and rendition, the filmmaker and the film subject, the one doing the arranging and the subject thereof.” (Press release “Gesture” by WKV Stuttgart)
François Pain, Tanaka Min La Borde (1986) Tokyo (2000), 2008-2021
38’10, color, sound, video
A red thread runs through François Pain’s work, that of community: community of creators experimenting with the camera “la paluche”, community in the psychiatric institution La Borde around Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, The film is composed of two sequences. The first, shot in 1986, sees the great butō dancer Min Tanaka dancing, at the invitation of Félix Guattari, in front of the patients of the psychiatric institution of La Borde. If the dance is sublime, the interaction with the patients, with an audience of this type, creates a very particular tension. Some look, others perceive, in a different way. The second sequence was filmed in Toride in the suburbs of Tokyo, in 2000, where Min Tanaka is supervising a group of Fine Arts students to create performances. He comes back on his relationship with Félix Guattari and on this moment of dance at La Borde of which he keeps, despite the time, a very vivid impression. He tells how he almost felt “on the other side” in front of this public, and how this moment pushed to the extreme all the complexities that there is to become one.
Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham, Channels/Inserts, 1982
32’11, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
To create Channels/Inserts, Cunningham and Atlas divided the Cunningham Dance Company’s Westbeth studio into sixteen possible areas for dancing and used chance methods based on the I Ching to determine the order in which these spaces would be used, the number of dancers to be seen, and the events that would occur in each space. Atlas employed cross-cutting and animated mattes or wipes to indicate a simultaneity of dance events occurring in different spaces, as well as to allow for diversity in the continuity of the image.
This film made possible in part by grants from: The National Endowment for the Arts, The Prospect Hill Foundation. Filmed at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio. Westbeth, January, 1981. Copyright © 1982 The Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
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