Aux côtés des artistes-interprètes de Fractus V (Compagnie Eastman / Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, 2015-2019) : Approche micropolitique d’un processus de création et de tournée

Abstract

Throughout repeated observations, intermittent interviews with the team and ordinary discussions, I realized that Fractus V (2015), a choreographic production led by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui alongside with four dancers coming from very different dance backgrounds, was (differently) experienced by the performers as a transformative journey, a “rite of passage” (Cherkaoui) that needed to be undertaken within a heterogeneous company. In this project, the choreography itself was considered by the dancer Johnny Lloyd as a “mantra”, “a thing that
you repeat over and over and over to transform”. It was a practice, and as such, it had to be not only learned but also performed again and again to be efficient. Consequently, for the performers, the choreographic work was not an end in itself but a tool for the playing//singing/dancing body-development. Noticing and studying the inner transforming power of this production asked me to follow the performers’ pathways on and out stage, before, during and after the show, in different places and different times, because the bodily transformations required patient observation to be revealed and verbalized. This way of conceiving a creative process might challenge our definition of genetic research and lead us to develop an ecological understanding of the Fractus V’s company as an intermittent and nomadic milieu or habitat dwelled by performers-in-becoming.