Contes Immoraux Partie 1 : Maison Mère

Kassel/Athens/Paris. A triangle. A tripod. Moving backwards and forwards, there and back, beween the surface and the depths. 

Erecting  buildings with no foundations, listening to the ruins, summoning the  gods and goddesses, preparing ourselves for oracles and fighting against  their revelations, breaking through the marble’s glossy lustre,  regurgitating the fascist brown plague, what do I know ? 

Kassel/Athènes. These cities are not my cities. I have no grasp of either of their languages.

And yet I do not  feel like a foreigner, just a passenger. On the scale of an individual I  am a comfortable migrant, a sort of middle-class, bohemian French  woman. Nothing, except for my birth certificate, betrays my migration. I  am one of the few who has allowed myself to surrender the full powers  bestowed to me, in order to live freely. I have taken on the role of the  weak, yet I inherited the chromosomes of kings. I have chosen to take  on the stubborn role of « the opiniated one », to try and make others  understand the necessity of seeing the body as malleable matter. I  migrate from one status to another, requesting that my sentence be  reduced… In this new life, I move forward every day, balancing on  emerging stepping stones, swaying from one step to the next, without  knowing whether my stepping-stones will give way and betray me ! 

Learning is less  conflictual than unlearning, of this I am sure. During an endless  adolescence, I was forced to tailor my behaviour, my actions and my  attitude, to conform with my appearance. The woman I kept secretly  hidden away eventually turned me into an adult. Learning to be one’s sex  is easy, it’s just a method of fitting people in, or a way of knowing  how to fit in. I broke the chain, I pushed the boat away from the  riverbank, to drift free. I like soft floors because when in contact  with them, it’s not the body fitting the form of the floor, but the  floor fitting the shape of the body. And yet I am attracted to mineral  substances. They scratch my skin and spill my blood. I am full of blood,  full of anger contained beneath my skin. Blood does not have borders,  or at least, not the same borders. My country is B+. You can’t read this  in my face. Only the B+ people know they come from the same place. At  Kassel/Athens/Paris, the B+ people don’t know each other, they don’t  speak the same language, but at least they know they are important to  each other. On this level, identity is an irrefutable piece of machinery  which never lies.  

What makes me  write ? … The misery pouring out of dispossessed populations. The  sadness of bodies in contradiction with themselves, caught between their  desire for individual freedom and society’s approval and affirmation. I  am searching for the smell which identifies them. I immerse myself in  the flock’s sweat as they struggle to stay alive, whilst the  executioners tighten the enclosure of power they hold in their hands.  Like you, I inherited Europe’s history of conflict. The blood is now  hazy vapour, but like a volcano which builds up its magma reserves, a  well is filling up, silently. A new era of chaos is in preparation, or  maybe it just never stopped growing… 1971, 1986, 1989, 2001, 2015.  Birth, Tchernobyl, the Fall of the Wall, the Patriot Act, the end of  democratic choice in Greece. 

My train of thought is a jungle which I am trying to tame and reclaim.

Immoral Tales – Part one: The Mother House

So that the  Allied troops fighting against the Axis partners could engage their  troops on European soil, they employed the defence strategy of carpet  bombing. This strategy, used on both sides, turned out to be an  unprecedented human tragedy for all of Western Europe. Entire cities  were wiped out, burying their inhabitants beneath the rubble. My  maternal grandfather was one of these victims when Nantes was carpet  bombed by the Allies in 1943. During my childhood, the image and  consequences of bombs did not seem real to me ; bombs were just the  stuff of fantasy, as they were for many children. It was much later in  my life, when I realised we were not going to lay flowers at the grave  of my grandfather but were instead going to visit a faceless mass grave,  that I understood the terrible infamy of bombs. Maybe it was at that  moment my mind stumbled across the words « Marshall Plan », the program  set up to rebuild Europe : organise mass destruction and then manage the  reconstruction of war-devastated cities, following the model of a  re-fabricated house and a rewritten urban development plan.

Build a  « Marshall » village out of made-to-measure cardboard, the same way we  put up a series of tents for refugees. Just here, beneath a seemingly  unthreatening cloud.

A simple,  repetitive gesture, like a robot. Spead out, trace, cut, assemble, put  in place, then start all over again. Everything seems perfect, except  for that cloud, which looks like it’s getting bigger, thicker and  darker. Maybe a bolt of lightening, a gentle breeze, then eventually a  series of heavy raindrops, a shower, maybe even a rainstorm with  torrents of water ! The Marshall village collapses, despite the energy  used up trying to save it. It turns into mush, a sticky mess in which  bodies drown…

Phia Ménard

Source : Maison de la danse