Nadia Beugré

Nadia Beugré has always used gender-related questions as the background to her work. For the first time, she poses these questions in a more direct, frontal manner. In L’Homme rare, she brings to the stage five dancers stemming from different choreographic horizons. She then brings into question its masculinity, going from their supposed bodies to the qualities of movement we attribute them with. In order to deconstruct them, the choreographer embarks on a process of the overturning and neutralisation of these gender-related codes, beginning with movements of the pelvis, kidneys and buttocks that form part of certain urban dances. Perched on high heels, and with their backs to the audience, the performers use flowing, wave-like movements in order to re-orientate the gaze of the spectators who, freed from their habitual filters of perception, can observe themselves as they watch. Questions raised on the subject of their voyeurism then summon up the wider issue of all our guilty gazes. Whether it is a matter of the commodification of these bodies or the usurped superiority of the observer over the executor, Nadia Beugré dismisses all the domination-related attitudes at work behind our gaze. In order to counter its discriminatory effects, this latest creation brings to the forefront those elements of our visual unconscious that constitute the foundations of the colonial and male gaze. L’Homme rare, a place where differences and individual liberties can find their expression, offers a choreographic counterpoint to the ideology of the standardized, idealized body which is prisoner to the social norms that format it.