For this research project, we take as an inspiration Céline Sciamma’s movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The movie, as the director claims, is a manifesto about the female gaze. It playfully and beautifully explores an outside of the male gaze and a vast field of gazing relationships (between the model and the painter as well as between the director, the actresses and the spectators).
In dance, the gaze is a dynamic entity involving the dancing body of the dancer and the viewers. In a way, the gaze is not only a vision but a vaster field of corporeal experimentations in which gazing at the dance, the gaze of the dance and the gaze of a dancer are entangled and interplay constantly. The male gaze is also manifested in dance, as much as in other artistic disciplines and can be tangible in all the layers of this entanglement of gazes. It also leads to representations of bodies as passive, mute objects, eroticised or victimised.
In this research lab, we want to address the question of the gaze in dance through experimenting with the idea of dancing portraits. We will invest in the radical potential dimension of the act of gazing, proposing a collective bodily platform of experimentation in which one can expand on the potential of other gazes than the male gaze.
Frédéric GiesAnne Juren
