DANS/PERFORMANCE
TESSA HALL — MEDUSA IS LAUGHING CONCEPT EN CHOREOGRAFIE TESSA HALL TEKST TESSA HALL, GEBASEERD OP THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA, HÉLÈNE CIXOUS MENTOR BOJANA CVEJIĆ RESIDENTIES CENTRE CHORÉGRAPHIQUE NATIONAL D’ORLÉANS, FESTIV’ELLES, LA SCÈNE NATIONALE D’ORLÉANS, WILD GALLERY DANK AAN BLEU PRINTEMPS, SOLÈNE WACHTER, SYNNE ELVE ENOKSEN, MARGARIDA MARQUES RAMALHETE GECREËERD IN HET KADER VAN HET MASTERPROGRAMMA STUDIOS AAN P.A.R.T.S.
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In the frame of the master programme at P.A.R.T.S. Tessa Hall (NZ) made a study of The Laugh of the Medusa by the French femininist author Hélène Cixous. Through her literary genre coined as ‘écriture féminine’, Cixous challenged the conventional bounds of patriarchal language. Hall’s physical research of the text gave birth to a personage. She is Medusa. Like Cixous, Medusa wants to invent a language that encapsulates all female narratives. She moves in an impossibly inefficient, illogical and explosive way until another body arrives... or another. Medusa sabotages all reason.
Medusa’s speech (excerpts) by Tessa Hall The following monologue is a collage of The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous (1976). A selection of key words and sentences were used to develop the ‘movement palate’ that Medusa attempts. With these pieces stitched back together, Medusa’s speech can carry her movement, and vice versa. [...] Tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence (that centuries old bagage). Secret. Heard. Because if you censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time, but your body is yours, so take it. As a woman, toward women. As a singular, toward the plural. No general woman, no one typical woman. We will go from “body” to “bodies” [...] You only have to look Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. Medusa and the abyss, the sowers of disorder, bring about a mutation—monster. She, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. It’s a most violent incandescence, explosive, utterly staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed. There’s force in her fragility, seething underneath, threatening return. It will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal, and it will knock the wind out of the codes [...] Unafraid of any place, of any same, or any other. In the moving, open, transitional space, she runs her risks and lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run in every direction. Medusa takes pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values. Never simple or linear but a thousand and one thresholds. Near and distant byways, the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at one time timorous and soon to be forthright because she arrives, vibrant, over and again. The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still. She is everywhere, she exchanges.
If Medusa is Medusa, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework. Shattering. Seizing. Burst. Burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames © Jonas Bang – Dream Diver, 2022 (still). of the artist. HOUSE FOR & SOUND, andCourtesy sold for a stinking fortune. For this practice canDANCE, never beIMAGE theorized, enclosed, LEUVEN coded— which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, but it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.
Now, we are going to blow up the fantasy of a “total” being. It is time for us to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it. To make it ours. Containing it. Let us return from afar, from always, from “without”, from the heath where witches are kept alive, from lacking, from below. Then, from beyond, an ephemeral wildness will sweep order #STUDIOSTUK EXPO ARTIST MOVING IMAGE AT MANHATTAN away with a force that can not be cut off, for here we are, returning, arriving over and again.
DI 01.11 We expire without running out of breath. We are everywhere and we’ve come back from always. We are the →“impossiJonas Bang ble” subjects and he needs to be afraid of us [...] ZO — Dream Diver 06.11 Medusa. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away to that part of her that leaves a space between herself where laughs exude from all her mouths. That she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes. This is an impossibility that will remain. Their turn to speak
N — Jonas Bang is een Deense regisseur en filmmaker wiens stijl gekenmerkt wordt door een rauwe en poëtische touch en een speels oog DI 01.11 Pleasure and violence 20:00 Inscribe voor detail. Voornamelijk gekend voor zijn muziekvideo's, is Dream Diver DO 03.11 the breath 20:00 The language of 1,000 tongues [...] debuut als autonoom cineast. Bang’s ZA 05.11 10:30, 12:00, N — Aan het begin van de zomer, een week voordat ze afstuderen en elk 14:30, 16:00 & 18:00 hun eigen weg gaan, nodigt de band Dream Diver een filmploeg uit om ZO 06.11 10:30, 12:00, hun eerste – en laatste – live optreden vast te leggen. De band bestaat Bio Tessa 14:30, 16:00 Hall & 18:00 uit zes jongens die elkaar al 10 jaar kennen van een school in Rødovre Tessa Hall is originally from voor New Zealand. Shemet joined the training cycle at P.A.R.T.S. 2016 andvan the hun STUDIOS prokinderen speciale behoeften. Onderinleiding leraren gramme 2019. Tessa’s interests lead her to take on various roles from performer to researcher to writer. She has Jonas Bang –inDream Diver vonden de jongens hun mojo in muziek en sound. In Dream Diver nodigen (2022). HD various video, open sound,for 8’ Rosas, including a piece published for the 2020 revival of Drumming. Tessa is a member of written texts ze je uit in hun klinkende universum gevuld met synthetische vogelflui�Curator: Karen Verschooren the current cast of Drumming. She also performs in 900 Something Days Spent in the XXth Century, a project led by tjes en abstracte droomteksten. Némo Flouret, and The Honey House by Nathan Ooms. VIEWING DATES Open their mouths
Tessa’s research has a feminist focus with particular interest in sexual difference philosophy. Her work is often about the voice of women—written andJonas spoken,Bang on paper on the stage. E— is and a Danish director and filmmaker whose style is char-
acterized by a raw and poetic touch and a playful eye for detail. Mostly known for his music videos, Dream Diver marks Bang’s debut as an autonomous filmmaker. E — Early in the summer, a week before they left school and went their separate ways, the band Dream Diver invites a film crew in to document their first – and last – live performance. The band consists of six boys who have known each other for 10 years at a school in Rødovre for children with special needs. Guided by their teachers the boys found their sound, and in Dream Diver, they invite you into their space-sounding universe filled with synthetic bird whistles and abstract dream lyrics.
HOUSE FOR DANCE, IMAGE & SOUND, LEUVEN