Balades – Urban Portraits
BALADES (STROLLS) originates from the need to bring circus outside of its dedicated spaces, and, through this, rethink the form and temporality of performance.
In this project, in which no audience is officially gathered, I install my trapeze in the urban space and explore the body’s relationship with the reality of the urban landscape. My movements become part of the everyday, surprise passers-by. Going beyond performance, I become a presence in the city, discrete but recurrent, at work on living poetry.
My suspensions are poetical attacks marking an act of resistance.
During these appearances, a film crew record these ephemeral moments. Video then becomes an accomplice witness of these poetical gestures, its trace, its memory. At a later time, echoing my ghost-like appearances, we invite the audience to watch the short film edited from these images to offer another outlook on their own city. Presented as a cine-concert, the short video is accompanied live by composer Eric Bribosia.
“… at the beginning there is a place, a place where people live, on which I wish to work. I try to understand, to seize, at the same time, everything that, of it, can be seen: space, lights, colors… and, in the same movement, that which cannot be seen, or cannot be seen anymore: history, buried memories, its symbolic charge… In this actual place seized in its complexity, I then inscribe an element of fiction, an image (most often a body at scale 1:1). This insertion aims both at turning the place into a plastic space and at exercising memory, revealing, troubling, exacerbating its symbolism…”
Ernest Pignon-Ernest