maud le pladec / okwui okpokwasili

DU 27 AU 31 JANVIER 2015
4ème ÉDITION - FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL MUSIQUE / DANSE
MAUD LE PLADEC / OKWUI OKPOKWASILI
HUNTED Création
Sur la musique de Kalevi Aho
Text of the perfomance (english)
I… I… I… I am… so… What am I?... Hungry. What else?... The pulse beating through my perineum — the
tight bridge from my ass to my cunt hole. What is all that in between? The sum of all that pulls us
together entangled like discarded limbs, like twigs broken and utterly, hopelessly combined. You’re
making my tongue go slack. I’m drooling on myself. Oh God.
I’m gonna open my mouth now, oh God. My eyes are starting to sweat. I’m pulsing and tightening
and between my legs, that little sopping abyss is a toothless mouth desperate to pump and pulverize your thickening muscle. I’m sick with burning. String me up like a heretic. Pull me by the bone.
I’m walled in within these pink ridges like the promise of teeth in the gums of the newborn babe, or
the memory of them in the toothless crone. But I’m burning from the outside in. Oh God. Because
the way I look at you it’s not me looking, it’s the eye of my fever lapping at my labial lips — I want
to scream when I start to puddle, I can feel the fluid from deep in my canal begging you to swim
in my lakes and then lap it all up with your tongue so that you drown when you try to drink it, but
those waters still won’t slake your thirst, even though you’re submerged in my roiling fuck juices —
an ever running reservoir. I want to bruise you with my pounding clit and break your mind with my
bursting. I want to rub you till you’re inside out and then we’ll burn together like the toothless hag,
beaten and pushed into a pit of fire, she’s not resisting anymore but she looks at you and me and
her eyes are eating you like a mouth and bits of you are crumbs spraying out from the corners of
her eyes, while she digests your broken image, her eyes say:
“You’re all lit up now from the light that shines from my cunt cause I light my cunt in the pot of the
earth.”
No she’s picking herbs, to staunch the bleeding, the bleeding when that little girl tried to push out
another littler girl, through her pubescent hips and everything broke and everyone was covered in
blood and the old hag looked and looked and cried because she saw the fire coming and she ran
and when she was caught, she said she was picking herbs to stop the bleeding. She said she tried
to save her, like she has saved generations of you assholes with her medicine. So underneath her
fear, she dares you and says, “you, master of science and money, you try to do better.” But you say,
“burn bitch” and when she’s a pile of ashes, you take her land and her cows and you sell it for forty
dollars and then you can eat for two months.
I have that feeling, that feeling that I can just open my mouth and swallow you whole. That feeling
where you walk in front of me your navel level with my forehead and you’re tumescent and flexing
© Okwui Okpokwasili - This text can’t be reproduced or used, even partially, without the author’s permission.
right at my upper lip cause I’m sitting down and I’m squirming imperceptibly at your waist and my
mouth falls open and my tongue goes slack and I’m am ready to receive the body and the blood.
When will the feast begin so that I can be engorged with meat?
I want to make something. Do you ever get the feeling you want to make something for the world
and invite the world to a sit down dinner with candles and the low throbbing hum of conversation
with all the food you love because people are weeping, we’re weeping in a storm of pain and we’re
swept up in the flood. I want to make something the way your grandma would make it with bacon,
chicken bones, pork marrow, beans, onions, some salt from a new mama’s tears and the spittle of
a fourteen year old virgin boy to lubricate and soften his palm because the feeling of wanting to
make something for the world comes from a feeling of love and grief and if I could make something
it would heal you. I put my trust in homeopathic design or vaccines because isn’t it true that you
must ingest a part of what sickens you to perhaps allow the body to recognize the illness or the
seeds of illness and get to work building its defenses. So take four hairs off of the heads of four men
who’s hands are bloodied from the knives they’ve used to carve through innocents, take five rusted
nails from the pipe bombs that have ruptured the organs of children, add the butt of a Kalashnikov
that smashed in the head of a father and the stone that landed the death blow on the head of a
raped woman convicted of adultery add more salt to taste from the tears of the crying child who
knew her and loved her.
From 1500-1660 Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed. 1500-1660
also saw the rise of wage labor, land privatization, hoarding of food stores by the mercantile class,
the proto capitalists, starvation and malnutrition among the poor, who used to be the workers,
who used to be subsistence farmers and riots, one beginning in Cordoba, Spain with a woman
who went weeping through the streets of the poor quarter, holding the body of her son who had
died from hunger — maybe that’s why there are so many images of witches feasting or holding
banquets — they were rioters who stole back the grain — that belonged to them — they were
midwives, autonomous women with land or access to common land, who used to feed themselves
but being increasingly excluded from participation in markets, or ownership of anything including
their children and their own bodies, isn’t it obvious that they would riot? — So being excluded from
capital markets, they were undisciplined by them — uncapturable capital. The witch is a chimera
carefully constructed by capital markets — the witch scare and the red scare might have more in
common then we think.
From 1500 to 1660 Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed.
How many of those tens of thousands were mothers watching their children starve because a
rising mercantile class owned more and more of the land and hoarded more and more of the grain
so in the street there’s a famine but the corner store house was collapsing under the weight of all
the grain it held — so that food prices would appreciate — and appreciate? How many were just
badass women laying siege to grain trucks so that they might make a loaf of bread? How many were
midwives dolling out contraceptives and performing abortions on those same starving women
who wouldn’t and couldn’t bare to bring more children into the world to starve, or to become grist
for the capital mill. Because capital needs bodies and with disease and then greed stoked famine
© Okwui Okpokwasili - This text can’t be reproduced or used, even partially, without the author’s permission.
there weren’t enough bodies and this was radical withholding that capital markets couldn’t stand —
when bodies are withheld — when bodies won’t open up and produce — when the hands don’t
grind the mill, when the arms don’t turn the levers, when the legs won’t open and no little baby head
is crowning out of the sacred canal — capital can’t abide that — but you, Mr. Capital market did not
bring me to this dance, you only got here just as I was getting things all heated up and now you
want to drag me out by my hair like a Neanderthal — and suck me dry without a little lubricating
talk — well I’m not going, I’m not going because I’m cooking—I’m really cooking…
“Pour in sow’s blood, that hath eaten
Her nine farrow; grease that’s sweaten
From the murderer’s gibbet throw
Into the flame.”1
“Imagine a river, the roiling waters of a river, over time the water leaves it mark on the riverbed,
widening bends, tracing patterns in the rock and soil. But that riverbed shapes the flow of the
waters today. So there are two selves then, acting on each other, the river and the riverbed. The
river is tumult”… The river is shaping the rock and the soil, carving a pattern in the earth, while that
pattern directs the river’s flow — so this moment — in the loop of our mutual gaze — we are in flow,
perhaps, and at the same time, carving our pattern — imprinting.
I am dancing in contested terrain, in between the river and the riverbed, vibrating at the site of
my first argument, is this how a lady moves? In public? Do you recognize this? I’m vibrating in the
space where your gaze meets mine and carves out an indelible mark on an imperceptible curve
somewhere along the banks of the mind that we are sharing right now.
Listen. Can you catch the faint echo of our vibration?
“And [the queen, the witch, surrounded by her court], who lights up her cunt in the pot of the earth,
will never tell us what she knows, and what we’ll not know.”2
1 (MacBeth, Act 4, scene 1)
2 (Kathy Acker, In Memoriam of Identity, page 42)
© Okwui Okpokwasili - This text can’t be reproduced or used, even partially, without the author’s permission.
AIRE DE JEU
DU 27 AU 31 JANVIER
4ÈME ÉDITION - FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL
DANSE / MUSIQUE
3 WORKSHOPS’BRUNCH
CONCERTS AVANT LES SPECTACLES !
Expérimentez l’univers des chorégraphes !
Ateliers accessibles tout niveau, à partir de 15 ans,
suivis d’un brunch convivial avec les artistes.
Concerts donnés gracieusement par les étudiants artistes du Conservatoire national supérieur
musique et danse de Lyon en préambule des
spectacles.
Au programme :
Elizabeth Paavel - Deux airs de Tina extraits de
l’opéra Frida y Diego / Justine Eckhaut - Monologue de Tina, Solo unos dias et parodie de Hitler /
Pauline Lorieux et Vincent Roess - Avant la nuit
pour contrebasse et percussion / Pierre Dekker Solo VI pour contrebasse / Victor Auffray - Solo
VIII pour euphonium.
> samedi 31 janvier 10h30 – 12h30
Workshop animé par Maud Le Pladec
Workshop animé par Julien Monty (Loge 22)
Workshop animé par Adam Linder
Tarif : 16 € par atelier / brunch
2 WORKSHOPS’PRO
Ateliers adressés aux danseurs professionnels.
> jeudi 29 janvier 10h – 14h :
Workshop’pro animé par Julien Monty (Loge 22)
> vendredi 30 janvier 10h - 14h :
Workshop’pro animé par Douglas Letheren
(danseur pour Vexed Vista d’Adam Linder)
Workshops organisés en collaboration avec le Centre national
de la danse de Lyon.
ÉCOUTEZ L’ŒUVRE DE KALEVI AHO
À L’AUDOTORIUM DE LYON
Kalevi Aho dialogue avec les « classiques »
du XXe siècle !
Dimanche 1er février 2015 à 16h
Bénéficiez du tarif réduit à 11 € sur présentation
de votre billet du festival Aire de jeu.
De 8 à 16 € / Billetterie Auditorium : 04 78 95 95 95
BABEL EXCEPTIONNEL !
Rencontre – discussion avec les artistes
(compositeur, chorégraphes et musiciens)
du festival Aire de jeu.
> samedi 31 janvier à 21h
Entrée gratuite dans la limite des places disponibles.
AMBASSADE DE FINLANDE
PARIS
Les Subsistances
Laboratoire international
de création artistique
Cirque / Théâtre / Danse / Musique
04 78 39 10 02 www.les-subs.com