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DURAN, Celine Genevieve S. Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara Art Appreciation 4CA5 Veronique Doisneau 2

Veronique Doisneau is a 37 minute film by Jerome Bel and Pierre Dupouey, it was recorded and commissioned by the Paris Opera and was shown at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space on March 9, 2009. It is a Theatrical Documentary about a retiring sujet, Veronique Doisneau, who dances in the corps de ballet and usually performs minor roles. Tom Phillips wrote about the film in 2009 as a Revelation of the toll a lifetime of physical and emotional discipline takes on a beautiful young woman as a dancer, an application of Marxist theory to a monarchical organization- Ballet. The film-maker is a dancer himself, and his portrayal does not slight the sublime nature of her toil. The result is a dancers story, told with a dancers exquisitely refined sense of balance. The film takes place on one night at the Paris Opera House. The stage is large and plain. You can feel the grandiosity of the Paris Opera House in the tininess of the dancers body. It completely defies the opening of the Paris Opera Ballet Season. The music, nothing, but a few verses of Veroniques narration, it starts with Veronique talking to the audience in a soft and hesitant voice about her life, career and opinions demonstrates excerpts from the dances she has performed. Everything is unusual; she enters carrying the usual baggage for a dancer, spoke

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giving her personal details, name, age and position as Sujet, her wage as a dancer, her two children ages 12 and 6, the operation that threatened her career when she was 20, this made her physically fragile after. This established the narrative mood of the film, it shows that the common dancer from the working class, encountering the same problems as any other person. The part that is never seen on stage, and no audiences curiosity ever explored. In an interview archive on Jerome Bel in 2013 where the film is part of the Exhibition The Real Thingan exhibition where diverse attitudes towards the performance art questions the ambiguous terrain of the real, challenging its construction and our mediated experience of it. He presents the film as a reflexive approach of the artist, dancer, and choreographer, stripping bare the tenants of the performance to expose and reflect on its constructs. As in in Susan Sontags words the dance as an ambitious collaboration to enhance a theatre of astonishment. The score may be by Stravinsky, the dcor by Picasso, the costume by Chanel or Lacroix, but the blow of the sublime is still delivered by the dancer. The primacy of the choreographer over the performer, of the dance over the dancer. The Dance is the dancer. He added that Veronique Doisneau can be seen as challenging the Aristotelian notion of direct speech, the moment when the performer (in the broad sense of the term) addresses the audience and the other, in order to force a distinction between a predetermined script that is being followed and an undefined space that allows for the self-determination of the actor/individual. The resulting distinction - and its subsequent blurring - draws into question the act of performance itself in the public and relational sphere, and the impossibility of differentiating the staged from an authentic site of being. I wish to focus on the second part of the film video cut in 4 parts, Veronique Doisneau 2. She begins to dance an excerpt from Points in space by Merce Cunnigham. It is about the

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changing conceptions of time and space which we have assumed for a long time are two different things. The movements channels chance and natural movements. First part is a series of movements of futuristic nature. Movements mimicking mechanical motion, robotic motion. Portraying the body as a transfiguration of weightlessness and of inhuman movement. It abandons not only musical form, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance compositionsuch as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. Then she comes back speaking in a tired and solemn voice. Her breathing is slow, which can evidently be heard through her mic piece. I have never heard a dancer speak right after a performance in such tired, solemn state as if the performance wasnt enough. For dance demands a degree of service greater than any other performing arts, the dance itself is the enactment of an energy which must seem, in all respects, untrammelled, effortless, at every moment fully mastered. And therefore one rarely sees the discomfort and pain of performing. She puts her dancing shoes on; removing layers of sock to what seemed a stone hard skin of years of practice and performing. She ties the pink ballet shoes in a manner secure and sure and tucks the ribbon in. Then she speaks of her influences, how she didnt enjoy dancing the choreography of Roland Petit or Maurice Bejart, but loved Petipa, Balanchine and Robbins and learned a lot from Nureyev and Cunningham. She commented on who had influenced her, above all Rudolf Nureyev, also Chauvire, Khalfouni and Makarova. Then she remembers her favourite solo which she never had the chance to perform, the title role Giselle from the third variation of Le Corsaire. Given the chance she would have done it movingly, you can see how her face lits up upon the memory of the piece. Then she wears her practice tutu in preparation for the dance. She hums the music of the part, her voice fissures as she dances. The illusion of her body is that of effortless and weightless figure. But in her voice lies the truth, the pain. She does so much work

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on demi pointe when she had pointe shoes on, and when she did the pas de deux of Giselle, she marks, as she should be accompanied by Albrecht. The strains of her voice in the poses that are most demanding, you could hear her gradually out of breath as the piece progressed. At the end, she took her time to get her breath back, sipping water, her heavy breathing broadcast throughout the auditorium. Her rawness, her exhaustion, the reality of dance was surprising. Not only had the stately quality of the material she performed not seemed especially strenuous, but ballet dancers conventionally strive to create an illusion of effortlessness, the Transfiguration I have stated earlier. In Ramsays words, Doisneau's exhaustion in real time effectively deflated the ballet extract's ethereal connotations of the so called theatre of astonishment. Moreover, the part where she recovers breath made the beholder uncomfortably aware of the mundane reality of their own embodied experience of inactivity in contrast to the escapism normally offered by Romantic ballets. Doisneau's performance was entirely lacking in the customary deferential formality that characterises self-presentation by members of ballet companies, although everything she said and did was carefully calculated and by no means casual. Clarity and precise execution are characteristic of ballet as an art form, but had the particular effect, in this instance, of keeping Doisneau's narrative from becoming sentimental Then Veronique tells us how she admires a fellow sujet Celine Talon. She then sits on the stage front with her back against the audience. Then a recording from Adams score was played as Talon danced one of Giselle's solos from the modern version. Following this, she carefully ensured that her own clapping outlasted the audience's applause, maintaining an ironic distance that inferred her own capacity for self-reflection. Then she explains the truths of dancing in the corps de ballet. How the most beautiful moments to watch are the most horrible to perform. Then excerpt of music from the Swan Lake adagio is performed in a humorous

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ungallant way. She explained how difficult it is to stay motionless for long periods as the backdrop to the principals pas de deux. Then, as the recording played, she stood in pose for long minutes before switching pose and then finally dancing briefly. It conveyed a sense of the loungers involved for the corps. deSingel International Arts Campus stated that the focus is literally and figuratively on a performer, it is a tribute to all dancers who find themselves in the shadow cast by prima ballerinas and star dancers. But in addition there is also a quest for the human being behind the performer, the person behind the icon. The piece is a Dance because it is dance construct, it removes all elements of theatrical astonishment and focuses on the Dancer being the dance, and it is the act of performance itself, performance art. It shows what it is required to survive the dehumanising effects of institutional structures. It shows social truths, the politics of a ballet company. The aestheticizing of politics in a totally ordered mass spectacle such as a performance. How the injuries are to be supressed and hidden as it marks the end of a ballet dancer. How dance ratifies both being completely in the body and transcending the body. The propose positive aesthetic values proportionate with the moral challenges of contemporary life. It is dance in Reality, not dance in a spectacled view. Reality presented on stage in a film, it is an irony in itself. Truth on stage. It sees beyond the view, it is visionary, Veronique Doisneau is more than the visual performance, it is the performance itself, the act. It is a work that sees life into things, it discriminates the superficiality of a grandiose ballet production as an ambitious collaboration and the reality of the dancer. It is Art for it knows what is genuine and what is make-believe. I would like to quote Vandenbroucke as she puts in words what best describes Veronique Doisneau being an art, the film created a precise and moving performance that turns

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around and questions its own nature, it moves into the most tender, and broad, and complex corners of human experience.

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Bibliography
Philipps, Tom. A Dancers Story. DanceView Times. March 9, 2009. www.danceviewtimes.com. August 19, 2013 Bel, Jerome. A day of Screening of Veronique Doisneau and Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Palais de Tokyo. June 27, 2013. www.palaisdetokyo.com. August 19, 2013 Bradshaw, Dove. Merce Cunningham Dance Company Dcor & Lighting. Dove BradShaw. 2010. www.dovebradshaw.com. August 18, 2013 Burt, Ramsay. Revisiting 'No To Spectacle': Self Unfinished and Vronique Doisneau. De Montfort University. 2007. www.dora.dmu.ac.uk. August 20, 2013 VRONIQUE DOISNEAU. deSingel International Arts Campus. 2010. www.desingel.be. August 20, 2013 Horosko, Marian. Last Night Stand-Veronique Doisneau (a film) and reflections on career transition for dancers. ExploreDance. 2009. www.exploredance.com. August 20, 2013 Cross, Sheila. Veronique Doisneau. Ballet.co Magazine. 2005. www.ballet.co.uk. August 20, 2013 Winterson, Jeannette. Imagination and Reality. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York: Random, 1996. 133-151 Sontag, Susan. Dancer and the Dance. Vogue Dec. 1986. Rpt. In Where the Stress Falls. Great Britain: Jonathan Cape, 2003. 187-193