We are looking for something primitive: a memory from before our birth. Something obvious, we all carry and that evolves within us: the first gestures of the first men. Between art, science and technology, our research tends to a virtual scene of rock art in action. Assuming that the cave paintings are the traces of oral performance or dance rites, they have been used as transmission and communication media for the knowledge of surrounding and environments of the early men (hunting, myth, history, art or religious content, shamanism). Through the scope of these fragmentary traces of history, we are seeking to reconstruct various performative scenarios echoing the paintings of the Chauvet’s cave.
In order to establish the experimental protocol based on the data found in the literature, we work out various scenarios:
- There’s a shaman in the cave, he is giving a cure ritual;
- There is a prehistoric performance group in the cave telling a story to a wider audience;
- Recent discoveries show that some paintings were drawn by the hands of women (Perrin [10], Snow [11]). The paintings were perhaps carried by women who were invoking the spirits of the animals to help in the hunt;
- Studies of Iégor Reznikoff [12] show that in some caves red dots indicate echolocation points (resonance in the cave). Chauvet’s Cave is recognized as a sanctuary rituals were they practiced it? Performers are invited to practice beatboxing, to loop their own body sounds;
- The cave could have been a school of arts. The paintings could have been made out of tracing shadows.
The Creative process of this performance is truly collaborative. The idea is to make ideas converging and scenes emerging live on stage. To do so, we elaborate working days connecting all the performers (actors, dancers, director, sound, visual and light designers) together during yoga sessions, jam improvisation sessions and rehearsals. We also open the our creative jam session to the public and inviting him to engage and to participate.
Conférences:
ACM MOCO, Greece, 2016
Performances:
Stereolux, Nantes, France, 2015
Stereolux, Nantes, France, 2016
FGO Fleury Goutte d’Or, Paris, 2016
Coordinator-Director: Anne Dubos
Creative directors: Jean-François Jégo (real-time motion capture, visual effects, scenography), Judith Guez (real-time drawings, scenography)
Dance Performers : Sophie Cousinié, Hortense Kack, Giorgio De Martino, Alexandre Aurouet
Assistant Director: Leonor Tournebeuf
Lightning designer: Anne Dubos
Photopraphy: Anne Dubos, Jean-François Jégo
Production: La Fabrique Nantes, Stereolux Nantes, INREV lab. Université Paris 8, mai 2016