Workshop 2016
by Vania Vaneau
Variation sur Blanc is a project that ran from 2016 to 2018, aimed at sharing and developing the research that led to the creation of BLANC, Vania Vaneau’s solo created in 2014.
In this creative workshop for professional dancers, we were invited to explore certain physical practices linked to the state of a body in transformation or trance: breathing, the porosity of presence, work on the different strata of the body and altered states of consciousness, questioning “the perishable body and the utopian body” (“The Utopian Body”, a text by Michel Foucault, was one of the foundations of this research).
Secondly, we focused on the experience of the Variation sur Blanc performance. This involved going through a short creative process by creating a masked and costumed group ritual, a meeting of ‘totemic’ figures, who revealed themselves and unfolded in space. For this performance, which we created together with the participants, we worked in depth on the emotions and the face, on the movement of spinning, on the making of costumes and masks and the way of dressing them and bringing them to life.
With this project, the challenge was to tackle central elements of my approach, combining organicity with manual and visual work. At the end of the week’s creative workshop, Variation sur Blanc was presented in public by the participants. Evoking a kind of ceremony, figures appeared, situated between the human, the animal and nature, belonging to indeterminate places and temporalities, then bringing out the singular presence of each participant and the bond of the group, which was transformed into an organism, a landscape or a community.
Variation sur Blanc was performed at Ramdam (Lyon) in 2016, at Micadanses (Paris) in 2017 and at the Pacifique CDCN in Grenoble in 2018.