Laura’s gang revolves around Olympia,  an 1863 painting by Edouard Manet. The scandal it sparked at the 1865  Paris Salon is well known, but art history has focused predominantly on  describing the recumbent figure in the foreground, rarely acknowledging  the one behind the bed holding a bouquet of flowers – a certain “Laure”,  who lived at 11 rue de Vintimille, close to Place de Clichy and a  26-minute walk from Manet’s studio at 81 Rue Guyot in the 17th arrondissement  of Paris. Indeed, more research has been devoted to the white woman’s  confrontational gaze than to the black woman’s bearing. Even the cat and  the flowers have inspired more reflections.

With LAURA’s gang, it’s time to turn the tables.

Source: Gaëlle Bourges

More information: gaellebourges.com

Gaëlle Bourges began classical dancing classes at the age of five, then  as an adult moved onto modern jazz, tap dancing, Commedia dell’Arte,  clown performances and dramatic art.  In 1999 she founded her first  working venture known as La Compagnie du K, and presented three works:  L’ange et le soleil, La vie de Barbara Haynes (avant sa mort) and Le  marin acéphale.  At the same time she pursued tertiary studies, earning a  bachelor’s and a master’s degree in the performing arts majoring in  dance at the University of Paris 8, and founded the Groupe Raoul Batz  with three members inventing and presenting a range of performances  focusing on corollaries with the invention of one-point perspective,  anatomy, the emergence of the “Italian style” theater with a proscenium  arch stage, robots, and “cogito ergo sum” as stated by Descartes.  Then  came L’âne, her first solo, and Strip performed by four artists and presented as part of a Paris “Nuit Blanche” [White Night] program.  Je baise les yeux can be seen as a further challenge to the eye following on from Homothétie 949 and also the result of ideas first explored with Strip as a bid to work on the way naked bodies (usually female) are viewed;  La belle indifférence is a continuation; En découdre (un rêve grec)  offers a solution to the crisis in Greece while paying tribute to  Antiquity and shows the futility of gender-based labeling.  Le verrou (a  figure wrongly attributed to Fragonard) is based on the Fragonard  painting “Le Verrou” [The Latch], exploring pre-Revolution times.  More  works followed:  Un beau raté, 59, A mon seul désir (Festival d’Avignon, 2015), Lascaux (premiered at the Festival Inaccoutumés, Ménagerie de Verre, Paris, December 2015) and Conjurer la peur (premiered in March 2017).  The work of Gaëlle Bourges shows a clear interest in the history of art, and a critical relationship with performance history. 

Source: Théâtre de la Ville

More information: gaellebourges.com

Juliette Belanger is a director and editor, mainly in the field of live performance (theater, dance, music, etc.).

It was during her first years of study in Métiers des Arts et de la Culture, which she began in Lille in 2018 and finished in Paris in 2021, that Juliette developed her skills and taste for images and video creation. 

She soon became intrigued by the world of live performance, and her first professional experiences began in 2019. Between theater festivals, companies and other production associations, she discovers and defends the stakes of video for the dissemination of live performance. She completed her university studies in 2022, taking the Licence Professionnelle Techniques et Pratiques Artistiques du montage at Lyon II.  

She discovered the world of dance in 2023, working with Fabien Plasson, video director at the Pôle Image de la Maison de la Danse. 

Today, she produces and edits video footage of theater and dance performances for various festivals, companies and cultural events, while continuing to create various video content around the performing arts (reports on creations, artist portraits, etc.).

The visual devices that each performance deploys are  places of the dismantling of tired paradigms, through working from  historical layouts which were seminal : the scandal de Manet’s Olympia, the unmade bed in Fragonard’s « The Lock », the sexually-charged atmosphere in Nijinski’s “l’Après Midi d’un Faune”,  the sulfurous slogan «To My Sole Desire » from the sixth tapestry The  Lady and the Unicorn, the  ithyphallic figure Lascaux cave, the Big  Prostitute on the water in the apocalyptic visions of John, etc.

Because the bodies represented are taken in a complex network of  senses and meanings and that they sometimes become emblematic within an  instant T of the history of the world; because these known  respresentations nevertheless continue to vividly inform our very modes  of perception, the method – inventing itself progressively throughout  the work – consisting in entering into these old bodies in order to  construct the image that they had formed backwards, injecting it with  and through friction, history of art discourses, a critical history of  representations and personal histories to attempt to change the nature  of the view of them and consequently of us.

From experience, we can observe that the images last a long time and  thank goodness. But one part of what we think they represent can  collapse. Thank goodness again. Because it’s about creating collapse. At  any rate, the machines for reflecting upon the images, in which  languages (the accounts) and bodies (the actions) interpenetrate to dig  up dissident paths.

Source: Association OS

More information: gaellebourges.com