ARCHIVES 2012 / Ch(ose) / Hic sunt leones

For two years, Sandine Buring and Stéphane Olry sporadically shared the daily life of the patients and caregivers at the hospital for multi-handicapped children in La Roche-Guyon. Children aided by complicated apparatuses, children without access to language whose inner life stays unknown for us. The dancer contacted them during workshops; the author and director attended these sessions. How can this troubling and nevertheless joyous journey at their side be related? Given their practices of the body and language, and their respective sensitivities, the two artists experienced their crossing differently. So they created two shows that function as a diptych and mutually enrich each other. For Ch(ose), Sandrine Buring glides into a suspended test tube. Her naked flesh rubs against the walls of the glass prison, her eyes, as through a ship's porthole, look for a horizon or simply our glance. The slightest twisting of her back, the slightest breath takes on an outsized amplitude in this tight and transparent space. Stéphane Olry plunges us into a thick fog. Deprived of vision, the spectators are surrounded by voices, intonations that are sometimes documentary, sometimes mysterious and shapeless. They weave a landscape in relief in which the concrete environment of the work and relationships at the hospital is turned upside-down by the sensitive experiences of the dancers and “child-bodies”. Two phases, two mediums – movement and writing – to probe, from different angles, a world deemed inaccessible, to attempt to fill a blank space. Like the Latin cartographers who wrote in the spaces of the yet unexplored deserts: hic sunt leones, here are the lions. RB