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.
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