Body library
A multimodal dance archive based on professional dancer Stéphanie Pons’s body memory - Directed by Gretchen Schiller
Summary
Stéphanie Pons: “Following my career as a dancer-performer, my collaboration on the archive was the first experience in which my voice was freed, heard and studied. After some twenty years without having danced this trio from Paysage après la bataille, a surprisingly intact bodily memory surfaced. Every bodily and visual sensation, the musicality of the movements, the sound of footsteps on the stage, the smells, the soundtrack, etc., everything came back to me like 20 years ago. All these memories are anchored in me forever.”
The result of several recording sessions with professional dancer Stéphanie Pons since 2020, the “Bibliothèque corporelle” presents a set of bodily data from the performer's memory and living archive of Angelin Preljocaj's Paysages après la bataille (1996). This archive includes Stéphanie Pons dancing and vocalizing a four minute choreographic fragment. The aim of this archive was to diversify the perspectives from which the dancing body is represented.
Context
The interdisciplinary IDEX Performance Lab project has developed a multidisciplinary scientific dynamic that includes the performing arts, social sciences and computer science. From the outset, the “Bibliothèque corporelle” builds on a dancer’s bodily memory. The research project was based on two observations: in the world of dance, the dancer's voice is rarely taken into account, and dance archives are often limited to video recordings, once again excluding the dancer's vocal experience.
