Eléonore Weber et Patricia Allio
Natural Beauty Museum
Emmanuel Valette ©
Emmanuel Valette ©
Concept by, Éléonore Weber and Patricia Allio
With Dragomir Covaci, Didier Galas and Ouiza Ouyed
Set design, Estelle Gautier
Lighting design, Emmanuel Valette
Sound and visual design, Félix
Video, Alexandra Mélot
Audiodescription, Laurent Mantel
Costume design, Laure Mahéo
Collaboration image, Cécile Friedmann
A production by Compagnie Allio & Weber // A coproduction with Grande Halle de La Villette ; Théâtre 95 de Cergy Pontoise ; La Filature de Mulhouse ; La Halle aux Grains de Blois ; MA scène nationale – Pays de Montbéliard ; Le Moulin du Roc, Niort ; Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Festival d’Automne à Paris // In collaboration with Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou ; Festival d’Automne à Paris // With support from Scène Nationale 61, Alençon – Flers – Mortagne // In partnership with Bubble Tree / Pierre Stéphane Dumas // With residency support from Grande halle de la Villette, CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Centre Pompidou de Metz, and from Montévidéo in Marseille // With production aid from DRAC // The piece is part of the Parcours d’auteurs artistic and cultural education project supported by the SACD.
Natural Beauty Museum will be presented for the first time on the 16th and 17th December at 20h30 at Théâtre 95 in Cergy-Pontoise.
The XXth century has produced its fair share of imaginary museums - physical spaces or products of our minds - inventing alternative models to the traditional exhibition space. With Natural Beauty Museum, Patricia Allio and Éléonore Weber have formulated a counter-utopia for the stage, in which the museum space becomes charged with real and virtual presences, diffracting the place of nature in our imagination. Inside this “Natural Beauty Museum” - where art has given way to the landscape - actor/visitors roam through the various strangely empty, peaceful rooms. During the visit, guests appear, and different interactive features click in - emotion intensifier devices, tactile panoramas, and landscape description generators...
During the course of this fantastical exploration, testimonies and other interventions gradually sound out the contradictions, upsetting the logic of taking delight in our contemplation of nature. Indeed, hidden behind the “pastoral” view lurks a disturbing form of strangeness, a sort of affliction affecting all levels of perception. By means of this specular and speculative museum, Allio and Weber pursue their documentary and analytical enterprise. After pinning down the various symptoms of the era, they turn them on their head and make them into performance-based propositions, bringing to the stage (and to crisis-point) the logic of normative discourse, its structure and shortfalls. By clinging to this new symptom that the two authors have termed as “landscape syndrome”, and of which we are all slight victims, Natural Beauty Museum takes a second look at how we relate to the norms of what see as beautiful, and our need for the sublime.
In the same place
Mathilde Monnier Territoires
In Territoires, Mathilde Monnier will be taking over the galleries of the Centre Pompidou during the course of a weekend in order to bring us a piece that deals with memory and circulation, "a collection of gestures from her work over the past thirty years". In doing so, the choreographer sets up the possibility of playing out memory in the present, from now onwards, or by means of anticipation.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Rétrospective
Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents the complete retrospective of his films at the Centre Pompidou. It consists of his eight feature films, thirty or so short (and rare) films, various collective works, and two feature films produced by him.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Night Particles
The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is guest at the Festival d'Automne and Centre Pompidou. His exhibition, featuring around ten video installations, transforms the former solarium into a nocturnal space inhabited by biographical and architectural reminiscences.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul A Conversation with the Sun (VR)
A Conversation with the Sun (VR), the Thai filmmaker's second foray into the realm of performance, uses virtual reality to set up the conditions for a collective dream.
Ligia Lewis Still Not Still
In Still Not Still, choreographer Ligia Lewis pursues her exploration into the silences and shadows of history. In this piece, the performers play out a score over and over again, the burlesque dimension of which makes it all the more tragic.
Forced Entertainment Signal to Noise
Over its forty years of existence, with Tim Etchells at the helm, the company has never stopped reinventing itself. And it continues to do so. Amidst an oscillating form of virtual reality, six performers find themselves deprived of their voices and their entire beings. The whole thing goes beyond all understanding... Welcome to this new world.
Sébastien Kheroufi Par les villages
Sébastien Kheroufi discovered Peter Handke's Par les villages at the onset of his artistic career. It evokes a writer's return to his native village. Amidst the twilight setting in which one universe declines in favour of another, the voices of the “offended and humiliated” break their silence.