Sexe symbole (pour approfondir le sens du terme)

Recorded at the CND 5 June 2015

Working the soil and digging a hole are activities as primal as an embrace or coitus: it is an error to see them only as sexual symbols; a hole, slime, a gash, hardness, and wholeness are primary realities; man’s interest in them is not dictated by libido; instead, the libido will be influences by the way these realities were revealed to him.
Simone de Beauvoir

The origin of the word sex (sexus, secare) is division, the primary binary categorisation of language, the beginning of the hierarchy of one thing over another.
The symbol is a union. Its function is to build a bridge between an object and its representations.
To us, it seemed obvious to reunite the study of our bodily sensations with that of the expression of our bodies. We positioned ourselves both as observers and actors of ourselves. Since we are neither just bodies nor individuals, we attempted to approach substance, sensation and emotion at the same time. We make our bodies move until it is they who cause us to move.
Sexe symbole takes pleasure in not differentiating the body from the self, sensation and expression, origin and ending. Anyway, what came first: the chicken or the egg?
Madeleine Fournier and Jonas Chéreau

Jonas and Madeleine have been working together since 2008. In 2011 they co-created Les Interprètes ne sont pas à la hauteur, a piece for which they imagined what could be done with danse macabre, a pictorial and sculptural genre that was very popular in Medieval times but which has no known transposition on stage. This research, carried out with a tangible taste for burlesque, led them to combine the results of their investigations with their expertise in contemporary dance, in a demanding choreographic composition.
Sexe symbole (pour approfondir le sens du terme) is their second piece together. The aim of Madeleine and Jonas is to address the binary nature of language. They represent this contrast through costume: one totally naked, the other fully dressed. The difference in costume thus becomes a metaphor for sexual difference. With humour, the two partners discuss categories such as the smooth and the rough, hot and cold, until they ‘mix together’ by swapping their clothes, which gives the effect of pulling them into a sort of liberating, exhilarating dance.

Updating June 2016