Visiting Experts: Alice Chauchat
door opens, roof rises, studio dissolves into city.
“Until the early 2010s, I considered the creation of dance pieces, teaching and the development of collective structures as parallel and distinct activities.
It was then that I began to study and develop a particular type of dance score, which became the basis and instrument of everything I did. These scores encourage the people who dance them to engage with each other without the need to identify or negotiate, but rather by engaging in acute attention to self, other and the unbridgeable gap between them. This attention is precisely what brings them together.
The more I delved into these scores, the more the distinctions became blurred. Genre classification gave way to shifting functionality (the same score can exist as a work of art, as a pedagogical tool, as a social dance).
Artistic creation has been transformed into a practice of continuous study and reformulation, where scores are repeated, appearing and reappearing in different, more or less public forms. Persistence replaced novelty, occurrence replaced event.
Although I always defended collaboration and collective practices, their consequences for the notion of authorship are becoming more radical: scores are made by all those who practice and discuss them, feeding the creative process. Authorship is a process that involves so many people and contexts that the meaning of the term is called into question.
Such a disintegration of the boundaries of a “work” into a continuous practice, without clear limits, has gone hand in hand with a valorization of the site as an essential element of dance activity. For this reason, I stopped closing the door or trying to ensure a protected environment for dance work, affirming instead the richness and disorder of what co-constitutes a dance: people, place, a moment.”
Bio
Alice Chauchat (F) lives in Berlin since 2001 and works as a choreographer, dancer, assistant, teacher, mentor, etc. Collaboration has been her recurring reality, making the negotiation of distance, alterity or de-centering a growing concern in her work.
Alice studied classical and contemporary dance at the regional (C.N.R.) and national (C.N.S.M.) conservatories in Lyon, as well as at P.A.R.T.S., Brussels. From 1998 to 2001, she worked with Thomas Plischke and Martin Nachbar within the B.D.C. collective. Since 2001, Alice has pursued her career as an independent choreographer, while continuing punctual collaborations, with Jennifer Lacey, Sabine Zahn, Anne Juren, Alix Eynaudi or Frédéric Gies among others. As a performer she worked with Xavier Le Roy, Jennifer Lacey, Sabine Zahn, Alix Eynaudi, Tino Sehgal, Juan Dominguez a.o.
Her interest in possible modes of sharing, whether of a situation, of artistic responsibility within collaborations, or of means of production and discursive tools led her to participate in the setting up of the open collective Praticable, together with Isabelle Schad, Odile Seitz, Frédéric Gies, Frédéric de Carlo (2005-09), to develop the internet-based active archive project everybodys toolbox (2005-2013 ), to accept the presidency of the artist-run PerformingArtsForum in Saint-Erme, France (2006-14), to facilitate the Teachback program for dance and pedagogy research with Jennifer Lacey at the ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna (2013-16) or to conceptualise with Ellen Söderhult and Eleanor Bauer the research and exchange project Nobody’s Business (2015-2018).
Expanding on her experiences with modes of acting and being together, Alice has been developing Togethering since 2014: a choreographic research on the ethics of intimacy across radical difference. She uses dance to activate correlated notions such as not knowing, tending towards or approximating, to investigate the qualities of engagement they generate. This ongoing research produces a collection of scores, choreographic concepts and performances. It takes place in dance studios, on stage, in urban space and in the form of texts.
Alice also teaches regularly at HZT Berlin, DDSKS Copenhagen, Stockholm University of the Arts, ImPulsTanz Vienna, DAS Choreography Amsterdam and punctually in a number of contexts around Europe and North America. Institutional experiences include directing Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an artistic research center in the suburbs of Paris (2010-12) together with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Grégory Castéra or working as a guest professor at HZT Berlin 2017-2020 and JLU Giessen (2018).
“Until the early 2010s, I considered the creation of dance pieces, teaching and the development of collective structures as parallel and distinct activities.
It was then that I began to study and develop a particular type of dance score, which became the basis and instrument of everything I did. These scores encourage the people who dance them to engage with each other without the need to identify or negotiate, but rather by engaging in acute attention to self, other and the unbridgeable gap between them. This attention is precisely what brings them together.
The more I delved into these scores, the more the distinctions became blurred. Genre classification gave way to shifting functionality (the same score can exist as a work of art, as a pedagogical tool, as a social dance).
Artistic creation has been transformed into a practice of continuous study and reformulation, where scores are repeated, appearing and reappearing in different, more or less public forms. Persistence replaced novelty, occurrence replaced event.
Although I always defended collaboration and collective practices, their consequences for the notion of authorship are becoming more radical: scores are made by all those who practice and discuss them, feeding the creative process. Authorship is a process that involves so many people and contexts that the meaning of the term is called into question.
Such a disintegration of the boundaries of a “work” into a continuous practice, without clear limits, has gone hand in hand with a valorization of the site as an essential element of dance activity. For this reason, I stopped closing the door or trying to ensure a protected environment for dance work, affirming instead the richness and disorder of what co-constitutes a dance: people, place, a moment.”
Bio
Alice Chauchat (F) lives in Berlin since 2001 and works as a choreographer, dancer, assistant, teacher, mentor, etc. Collaboration has been her recurring reality, making the negotiation of distance, alterity or de-centering a growing concern in her work.
Alice studied classical and contemporary dance at the regional (C.N.R.) and national (C.N.S.M.) conservatories in Lyon, as well as at P.A.R.T.S., Brussels. From 1998 to 2001, she worked with Thomas Plischke and Martin Nachbar within the B.D.C. collective. Since 2001, Alice has pursued her career as an independent choreographer, while continuing punctual collaborations, with Jennifer Lacey, Sabine Zahn, Anne Juren, Alix Eynaudi or Frédéric Gies among others. As a performer she worked with Xavier Le Roy, Jennifer Lacey, Sabine Zahn, Alix Eynaudi, Tino Sehgal, Juan Dominguez a.o.
Her interest in possible modes of sharing, whether of a situation, of artistic responsibility within collaborations, or of means of production and discursive tools led her to participate in the setting up of the open collective Praticable, together with Isabelle Schad, Odile Seitz, Frédéric Gies, Frédéric de Carlo (2005-09), to develop the internet-based active archive project everybodys toolbox (2005-2013 ), to accept the presidency of the artist-run PerformingArtsForum in Saint-Erme, France (2006-14), to facilitate the Teachback program for dance and pedagogy research with Jennifer Lacey at the ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna (2013-16) or to conceptualise with Ellen Söderhult and Eleanor Bauer the research and exchange project Nobody’s Business (2015-2018).
Expanding on her experiences with modes of acting and being together, Alice has been developing Togethering since 2014: a choreographic research on the ethics of intimacy across radical difference. She uses dance to activate correlated notions such as not knowing, tending towards or approximating, to investigate the qualities of engagement they generate. This ongoing research produces a collection of scores, choreographic concepts and performances. It takes place in dance studios, on stage, in urban space and in the form of texts.
Alice also teaches regularly at HZT Berlin, DDSKS Copenhagen, Stockholm University of the Arts, ImPulsTanz Vienna, DAS Choreography Amsterdam and punctually in a number of contexts around Europe and North America. Institutional experiences include directing Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an artistic research center in the suburbs of Paris (2010-12) together with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Grégory Castéra or working as a guest professor at HZT Berlin 2017-2020 and JLU Giessen (2018).