The Joji Inc company was founded by Johanne Saunier and Jim Clayburgh in 1998. She – “Jo” – comes from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Rosas company in which she was one of the principal dancers for 10 years, notably in Mikrokosmos, Stella and ERTS. She has also worked with Michèle Anne de Mey, Fatou Traoré and Thierry de Mey, and has taught at the PARTS school. Johanne Saunier is an interpreter par excellence. He – “Ji” – was one of the founders, 30 years ago, of the Wooster Group in New York, where he was a decorator, lighting designer and official scenographer. Jim Clayburgh also created sets for several shows by the Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman and the Isabella Soupart company. The two of them, the brunette who isn't afraid of anything and the tall elegant New Yorker, form a complementary choreography/scenographer couple. Since 1998, they have created, together, about 10 shows, the solo Sans la voix des maîtres (Without the Masters' Voice), the piece for three dancers Final Scene, another for four dancers, Landscape with 4 Figures, and It's Like…, SWOT, Urban Bubbles. Launched in 2004, the Erase-E(X) project unfolds successively in six parts choreographed and danced by Johanne Saunier and other interpreters. This show achieves the equilibrium, always unstable, that illustrates the definition of art according to Joji Inc: a dance that would be just as physical as sedate, as overflowing with energy as technically unstoppable, constantly relaunched by the inventiveness of the interpreter's gestures and stage practices. At the Festival d'Avignon, Johanne Saunier and Jim Clayburgh presented parts 1, 2 and 3 of Erase-E(X) in the Sujets à Vif program in 2004 and 2005.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a painting by Willem De Kooning to reappropriate it. It was on the radical model of this act of modern art, Erased De Kooning Drawing, that Johanne Saunier and Jim Clayburgh imagined their own show, Erase-E(X), interpreted by Johanne Saunier: a palimpsest dance, a relay in which several choreographers will erase and recreate the piece of another. The first sketch is offered by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a reinterpreted dance on the model of the mechanism that functions, races, then jams, by The Wooster Group as a variation based on the character of Bardot in Le Mépris (Contempt) by Jean-Luc Godard. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker next recasts the piece as a pure, abstract rite, accompanied by Indian percussion instruments, before the Brussels actress-dancer, director and choreographer Isabella Soupart makes Bardot spring up again, but decked out with a strange cybernetic, paranoid and blundering bodyguard. In the next two parts, the video-maker Kurt D'Haeseleer then the composer Georges Aperghis take hold of this staging and sound game through creating/erasing. Lastly, it is Johanne Saunier herself who closes the cycle on a very sensual note by surrounding herself with two dancers. Before these six pieces performed in their continuity, we feel even more the physical work of a dance that makes the machine seize up, contaminates and traps the myth of the femme fatale, disturbs the communication between beings and between the media, attacks movie glamour to project it and scatter it on the stage of gestures and moods. Le Mépris is replayed here in a panicky version, the diva becoming a moth that knocks into the projectors' light, and the languid sensuality of the star is little by little minutely examined through a biting but absolutely joyous irony. The dancer Johanne Saunier goes from one universe to the other with astonishing ease, engraving her share of artist-interpreter in each of the show's writings.
Distribution
concept: Joji Inc
chorégraphie: The Wooster Group (1), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (2), Isabella Soupart (3), Johanne Saunier (6)
vidéoperformance: Kurt d'Haeseleer (4)
texte musical: Georges Aperghis (5)
scénographie et lumières: Jim Clayburgh
interprétation: Johanne Saunier, Charles François (3), Anna Massoni (5,6), Julie Verbinnen (5,6)
ingénieur du son: Philippe Arnaud
régie vidéo: Benjamin Lasserre (4)
assistantes chorégraphe: Julie Verbinnen (1,2), Anna Massoni (4), Shila Anaraki (5,6)
électronique: Alex Fostier (5)
costumes: The Wooster Group (1), Anke Loh, Perrine Mees (2), Isabella Soupart (3), Joji Inc (4,6), Benoît Coutiez (5)
administration et diffusion: Gaëtane Bibot
Production
production: Joji Inc
Erase-E(X) a été créé dans le cadre du Sujet à Vif,
coproduction: Sacd/Festival d'Avignon, avec le soutien de la Communauté flamande (parties 1, 2, 3)
avec l'aide: du ministère belge de la Communauté française service de la danse Coproduction Théâtre de la Ville-Paris (partie 4), Charleroi /Danses (partie 4,5,6)
avec le soutien: du Conseil général du Val d'Oise, de l'ADIAM Val d'Oise, de la DRAC Île-de-France, dans le cadre du soutien à la création du réseau Escales danse en Val d'Oise (partie 4)
avec l'aide du Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique