FOCUS PERFORMANCES

se forme auprès de Leila Haddad. Chez celui qui milite sur tous les fronts pour que le corps ne soit plus un tabou, le geste devient profondément subversif. Danser le baladi, que l’on appelle aussi, de manière réductrice, « danse du ventre », permet de fluidifier les frontières entre les genres et de mettre à mal les oppositions entre, d’un côté, un corps masculin figé dans la roideur virile et, de l’autre, un corps féminin voué à la séduction, mais masqué et souvent voilé. En avril dernier, Alexandre Paulikevitch se produisait au Silencio. Il était seul sur la scène dépouillée. Les tremblements, les secousses sèches et sa maîtrise millimétrée remplaçaient la fluidité et les ondulations habituellement associées au baladi. C’est cette approche hantée et absolue de la danse, celle qui convoque le champ lexical de la volcanologie, qu’il donne à voir dans le cadre du Hors les Murs, où il présente une nouvelle création élaborée à partir de ses précédentes chorégraphies : « Ma pièce, simple et minimale, traite du droit à la différence : celui d’être un homme ou une femme, d’être handicapé, d’être un corps obèse. Loin des stéréotypes de la danse, mon discours se situe audelà du divertissement. Ce que je fais passer, je l’énonce depuis une région qui danse au bord d’un volcan en ébullition, où entrent en fusion tristesse, douleur et violence. » Born in Beirut in 1982 where he has lived since 2006 after dance and theater studies at the Université de Paris 8- Vincennes- Saint- Denis, Alexandre Paulikevitch came to attention by taking up baladi, a dance form popular in North Africa and the Middle East but now often seen as passé. He was trained as a baladi dancer by the celebrated Leila Haddad. The movements it requires are deeply subversive when deployed by an artist totally committed to upending all taboos associated with the body. For him, baladi dancing, also sometimes reductively called “belly dancing,” is a way to fluidify the boundaries between genders and challenge the traditional binomial of the stiff and virile male body versus the female body, meant to be seductive but masked and often veiled. Last April Paulikevitch performed at the club Silencio. He appeared alone on a stripped-down stage. Trembling, jerks and his tight mastery of motions replaced the fluidity and undulating abandonment usually associated with baladi. The most appropriate descriptions of his method involve the vocabulary of volcanology. This haunted, absolute approach to dance will be seen in a new piece he is presenting as part of FIAC Hors les Murs programming. Based on previous works, “My piece is simple and minimal. It’s about the right to be different, whether one is a man or a woman, handicapped or obese. I reject dance stereotypes. My discourse is not a kind of entertainment. What I do comes from a territory dancing on the edge of a boiling volcano. The result is a fusion of sadness, sweetness and violence.”

Translation, L-S Torgoff Valentin Lewandowski graduated last year from the Paris fine arts school where he studied under Emmanuel Saulnier. The subject in his performance (2013-14) was the letter H, the mute keystone of all discourse. Screened on several occasions, at the Saint-Eustache church, the See Studio gallery and the last Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Center, this performance video condenses themes that run through the work of this young artist. He hobbles language all the better to inhabit it and reveal the organic body of speech—in Lewandowski’s work, consciousness arises from obstacles to ordered and fluid movement. In La Possibilité que je m’appelle moi-même, the piece he is presenting as part of FIAC Hors les Murs project, he stages himself trapped in a curious structure made of wood and foam rubber where he can only lie down. Using personal notes, he declaims his monologue from inside this poorly designed modular living

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