ART.13 [Reportage]

For the Lyon 2023 Dance Biennial, Phia Ménard, associate artist of the Biennial and the Maison de la danse, is creating the show “ART.13”.

A few months before the show’s premiere, the choreographer and her team welcomed filmmaker Fabien Plasson to the workshops of the Non Nova company in Nantes. 

In this report, we discover Phia Ménard’s creative process, her artistic approach and her ongoing dialogue and close collaboration with her team.

An immersion in the creation of ART.13 that reflects the way in which Phia Ménard skilfully blends dance, work with visual and sound materials, and links with nature…

ART.13 is a stage act about a world of arrogance that is collapsing but refuses to be silenced. The starting point is a bucolic scene in a domesticated garden, where, on a perfectly mown lawn, a statue of a man is enthroned, raised by a plinth that distances it from the ground. A symbol of Culture, while Nature invites itself into the animal that extracts itself from a hole with an axe. Should the statue be knocked off its pedestal or vice versa? Is this an attempt at revolution, or the dawn of a new mode of action? Destroy or Deconstruct could be the subtitle. Perhaps we’re running out of other ways to transform ourselves.

Source: Cie Non Nova