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.
WO 12.10 20:30
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.