Jennifer Lacey

Following her invitation by the Mona Bismarck American Center, an institution dedicated to promoting American arts and culture, Jennifer Lacey took an immediate interest in the characteristics of the place itself: its history, functions, decoration and a whole host of minor details that affect or fragment the way we apprehend a space.
Taking in the various salons of this private mansion, she has devised a performance of a unique kind, using perception-based contamination and discrete intervention - alternating between physical presence, withdrawal, and peripheral awareness. In the course of her wanderings, accompanied by the choreographer Alix Eynaudi and the musician Zeena Parkins, her body gently moves out of synch, and this furtive dance becomes an index which maps out the space for us, beckoning the audience to join this sensorial, out-of-the-ordinary detour. Together, they create unexpected figures and shapes, conglomerates of images and sounds - in which imitation and camouflage are used to disseminate the various signs and symbols, and to bring out the visuals of the space itself. From out of this Lieu Historique revisited, emerges a territory of a fluctuating nature, shaped by the bodies which inhabit and recompose it.

Based in France since 2000, the American choreographer Jennifer Lacey has forged a unique path on the fringes of dance, performance and critical investigation. This has lead to numerous collaborations - notably with the set designer, Nadia Lauro on Chateaux of France and, more recently, Les Assistantes. Her work now concentrates on transversal forms - short, ephemeral pieces which reflect their immediate context. These site-specific, performance-based investigative works take a fresh look at the place of the body in heterogeneous environments.