[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
First
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column][vc_media_grid grid_id= »vc_gid:1622885557391-a65ba283-d3b0-7″ include= »286,287,288″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width= »2/ 3″][vc_column_text] Let’s take a woman today.
A woman artist of today.
An ambitious female artist of today.
A woman artist, mother, daughter, sister, in love, who works.
In short, a woman of our time.
She wants to be the first, the first in her class.
She wants everything, right away. She deserves it, after all.
She wants to excel in everything and is not afraid to say so.
She also wants it to be like the first time. Like the very, very first time.
With Première , Chloé Déchery tackles a new creative project that brings into play, in a shared way, with humor, with irreverence, sometimes on the edge, the questions of female ambition, patterns of success and self-invention.
To do this, she develops a scenic research work that incorporates elements and materials borrowed from other fields of activity – popular song, gardening, disguise, feminist theory, the constitutional code – to question, on the modes of unfolding and deployment, what a word spoken by a woman artist, on a set, that is to say a public word that mobilizes imaginations, declines identities and tries to thwart assignments, can engage self, through performative discourse, speculative narrative and the transformative power of the stage.
The project, which has been developing through a series of research residencies since September 2019, unfolds from three entries:
- a performance, entitled Bardane et moi, which involves a 40-year-old woman with a green plant: Burdock. The performance imagines and deploys, on stage, different female figures of self-invention (the little girl, the Amazon, the political orator, the mother, the magician) – to summon and bring about forms of existence in which sharing, interdependence and parasitic symbiosis can prevail over individual destiny and standardized patterns of success. By inventing speculative and alternative figures of the self, we also imagine community forms of existence; temporary and fragile communities, but also united, loving, traversed by outbursts of tenderness and gestures of care.
- a performed conference , entitled Creating under other names than one’s own , and devoted to the practice of heteronymy, that is, the fact of writing under another name than one’s own. This form, between scholarly conference and performance, aims to explore the construction of professional identity in art based on questions of name and reputation. What does it mean when a female artist signs for another (ghost or « negro » author), takes another’s name (« pseudonym »), poses as someone else? another (« heteronymous ») or decides to disappear entirely from the public domain (« anonymous »)?
- a film of interviews with senior women artists which will constitute a resource and an oral history of the genealogies, trajectories of influence and solidarity relationships that can emerge between generations of women artists.
One of the first hypotheses of this multi-disciplinary work (theater, performance, dance, sound creation, video) postulates the emancipatory and playful power of self-invention through the figures of the alter ego (mythified and/or abject). By examining the patterns of representation linked to excellence and success, it will be a question of questioning « fama » (name, reputation) as much as « in-fame » (anonymity, darkness).
Between 2019 and 2021, the project was hosted in research and creation residencies at the Studio-théâtre de Vitry, at the Center National de la danse, at 104, at pad-Cie Nathalie Béasse in Angers and at Critical Path in Sydney, Australia. .
– FRENCH VERSION –
« First » is:
- a one-woman play (in dialogue with a plant)
- a lecture-performance about alter ego in a matrimonial history of art
- a film of interviews with senior female artists.
In French, “Première” means the opening night.
It also designates the woman who is the first one; the woman who excels at what she does.
////
Let us picture a woman in today’s world.
A woman who happens to be an artist in today’s world.
An ambitious female artist in today’s world.
A woman who happens to be an artist, a working mother, a daughter, a sister, a colleague, a lover, a friend.
Let’s call her a woman of our times.
She wants to be the very first, the first one.
She wants to enter into the light; make an entrance that counts; she wants to shine.
She wants it all and she wants it all now. She deserves it, after all.
She wants to excel in everything and is not afraid of saying so.
She also wishes it could be like the first time, the very first time.
With Première, Chloé Déchery is developing a new performance project that seeks out to articulate questions around female ambition, authorship, success/failure and the reinvention of the self through performative speech and speculative fiction.
One of the first hypothesises of the work is to invest in the emancipatory and playful potential of the alter ego, either searching for aggrandizing, mythological figures of the self or seeking to explore abject and infamous alter egos. In the word “infamous” lies the latin root “fama”, that is the « name » that brings the reputation, the recognition, the fame. We will look at what happens when we renounce both our names and our reputation.
For this project, Chloé Déchery is developing performance work that borrows from other fields and activities ranging from popular music, fancy dressing-up, gardening, feminist theory, law texts to the format of the academic conference or the professional TV interview. She seeks to interrogate how discourses and gestures delivered by a female artist can emerge and take place on stage, that is how words and actions can take place in the public sphere, informing new imageries, declining plural and contradictory identities, beyond dualist attributions, and therefore questioning, with lightheartedness and humor, issues revolving around female ambition, creativity and the joy of failure.
For this project, Chloé Déchery is collaborating with Charlotte Couturier, performance and musical artist, vocal coach; Raphaëlle Doyon, lecturer in theatre studies at Paris 8 university, expert in theatre and gender studies; Deborah Pearson, writer, playwright, performer and dramaturge and Benoît Verjat, graphic designer and scenographer.
The project is developed with the support of Studio-théâtre de Vitry, the 104 and Critical Path, in Sydney, Australia.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width= »1/3″][vc_column_text]
Crédits
Un projet de Chloé Déchery
Interprété par Chloé Déchery
En collaboration avec:
Raphaëlle Doyon, collaboration artistique et scientifique
Charlotte Couturier, accompagnement vocal et collaboration artistique
Deborah Pearson, aide à la dramaturgie
Matthieu Canaguier, création sonore
Alix Boillot, scénographie
Anna Rinzo, création costumes
Une production Moustache – avec l’accompagnement de Teresa Gentile
Avec le soutien du Studio-théâtre de Vitry, du 104, du Centre National de la Danse et de Critical Path à Sydney, Australie. Financé par Eur ArTeC.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text]
Further information
For further information, including tech requirements and sample press releases, please contact Chloé on chloe@chloedechery.com
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]