Performance put to the test by images
The Irregulars at the Ménagerie de Verre
Cinematographies
During the commentary-driven projection of Atala’s film Saison 1, épisode 2, the room became a movie house. Standing in front of the screen barring the stage, the filmmaker dissected filmic procedures (montage, rehearsal, continuity) systematically, to the point of exhaustion. Cinema and performance were intertwined but remained impermeable to each other. That is, until… a miracle! The Real, in the form of traditional dancers seen earlier in the film, burst into the room, “exploding through the screen”: like in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, fiction met reality, with no possible return back, in a sort of epiphany, a miraculous incarnation. We were dumbfounded by this appearance, to the point where it obliterated the memory of the film that had just been presented along with its conceptual and funny deconstruction of cinema.