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Stage Living Stage | "Corps d'été" | Photo © David Noir

Summer Body Workshops

Individual and group lessons | Game management | Courses and workshops

Theatre ► Improvisation ► Performance

Live Stage Stage Internship | "Corps d'été" | Photo © David Noir
Stage Living Stage | "Corps d'été" | Photo © David Noir

For those who are idle at the beginning of the summer, for those who need something to do on weekends and for those who are curious about themselves all year round, Scène Vivante is offering a series of workshops on the body and its exhibition, both in life and on stage, on Saturdays and Sundays in July.

Formation Scène Vivante | David Noir | Classes, workshops, coaching | Theatre | Improvisation Method | Performance | Public Speaking | Visual © David Noir

Description

This series of workshops composes a program ranging from initiation to an elaborate practice of body and thought as tools and actors of performance. The themes of the sessions are to be taken as first steps or springboards towards a personal research, guided throughout the sessions.

Saturdays will be more specifically dedicated to nude bodies and will take place in Paris. Sundays will be dedicated to performance, which obviously does not exclude nudity and will take place in Montreuil (location).

The workshops are independent of each other in terms of participation, but connected through the themes they address. Each session lasts 4 hours.

One consciousness and one body | Nudity and performance in July

On the eve of the summer holidays, many bodies are preparing to show off. The idea seems to be to show off as much as possible within the limits of what is tolerated, what is assumed, even claimed. Even if it means reducing oneself to a pocket handkerchief, a small piece of cloth, sometimes held in place by a thread, is enough to dress up the honest integrity of the person. At least in our culture. For others, and in the case of women, it is the opposite. It is then a question of being completely covered. Does it make that much difference when the real subject remains in all cases fundamentally masked?

Here or elsewhere, nudity - and we must obviously understand the only one that concentrates all the others, that of the so-called "intimate" parts - still raises questions. It is a question that underlies all the issues that societies debate. It cannot be got rid of by intellectual closure, nor by the apparent casualness of a fulfilled sexuality or a free body. This is not enough outside of one's own environment of reference, because the world exists all around, at the borders of naturist beaches where it turns out that the other is precisely other.

The question of the body; the beautiful, the ugly, according to the norm, the personal appreciation or the relation to one's own. The question of complexes, desires and the rejections that result from them. The question of clichés on the aesthetics of love too. Everything, in the eyes of the human primate, is a matter of context. The issue is the proportion of dilation of the famous intimate sphere in relation to public spaces.

On the scale of societies, history seems to regress in the same proportions as it advances. By taking off one's clothes and showing off, one reveals oneself to be more political than one thinks. More political than any speech.

Nudity, or rather nudity, whether it is intended to be modest, natural, sexual or obscene, is an indicator of one's own vision of social life, roles and gender. It is unstoppable and it is easily verified by exchanging a few sentences of discussion with anyone. Nude speech always implicitly debates tolerance and limits, because the nude posture links us, whether we like it or not, closely or remotely, to the "risk of pornography" in the public space, but also to the destruction of intimacy as a private and dreamed space of protection.

Behind this concept of "pornography", recently brought out of its closet, vaguely trivialized, lies the even more violent question of excitement. Dreaded, expected depending on the circumstances. Our animal part always poses us more intimate, social, and even civilizational problems (cf. management by religions of the social ban). With such an ally, the law lies down and delegates the subject to it).

The scene teaches us that nudity can be an element of language. That the style of its representations does count and influences not only our instincts but also our thinking at its most evolved level.

Nudity of men, nudity of women. An infinite work to be written one day. Reflection on this ban that we know by heart. The fact remains that we are still entitled to ask the question today: What is so dangerous about it that it is still in force? Why does the hidden body remain the only socially acceptable one in the most normalized discourse? Why is real sex absent from the public arena, only to reappear at times under the guise of the threat of rape or mercantile exploitation?

An eternal pretext and a recurrent response argument: the child who is "protected" and who must never see... what he will become. This is nevertheless a rather short answer in view of what the question entails.

We at least know the ins and outs, if not the outs, and we are locked into our refusal to take for granted what makes us deeply paradoxical and irrational. Yet this is our basic logic. It is there that performance art, freed from narrative surpluses, has something to say and to show about the trap of the so-called coherence in which our first nature, incapable of dealing with our recent consciousness, has been hastily led astray in order to deal with the most urgent needs for a few thousand years. It was necessary to hurry to "evolve" socially before the animal had time to understand what happened to him.

Mirror of the people, nudity is also for us the appearance of the wild and the destitute, sometimes the very symbol of the misery that accompanies it. This reminder of the "lack of everything" proper to the infant that we were, is obviously enough to make one shudder. Woe betide the person who has not skilfully disguised this profound destitution in a seductive display.

The bourgeois theatre has not been able to tackle all these questions, which are eminently linked to representation, and dance has often turned them into an aesthetic that is carefully castrated from the true desire inspired by our unveiled flesh. Cinema and television, for their part, mostly tell only stories. Certainly the documentary-fictional cinema that is porn, photography and the testimony of a flourishing Internet inform us, but does performance really go elsewhere and would it be able to take us beyond?

Libertine, libertarian, liberal... free... named after the vegetal tissue where the sap of trees circulates? Only individuals can use their bodies, but to say what? The question is not to know if one wants to walk naked in the street or not, but to understand through oneself, why and how this ban responds to such a strong self-censorship. On this theme in particular, we are ahead of the law. In the practice of exhibition on the Internet, it is frequent that a tightened frame on the genitals accompanies in fact, the establishment of anonymity. But in the end, what does it protect? By excluding the face, the close-up on the sex puts expression out of the picture. As in many situations, it is often a personality that one is eager to conceal, much more than an identity that remains a formal number.

Would the openly exposed exhibitionists of the Web like to be recognized for what they are? Are they really free of other people's opinions? Do they not foresee the possibility of being identified by malicious relatives while surfing the Web? Can this living pornography and the nudity it implies, two steps away from the tangible reality of our daily lives, be considered as a revolution in progress when, for example, in a district of New York less than a year ago, the municipality had rushed to erase the giant representation of a penis on a blind wall, at the request of the inhabitants? Same story in Stockholm. Brussels as for her, displays several frescoes with sexual subjects, in particular a vulva and a anus still subject to debate today.

Doesn't art, even when called into question, once again provide a guarantee that devalues reality? And if we really want to look at the "real" of our nature, of our natures, of men, women and x genres after them... shouldn't we keep art as a tool to avoid doing so? Art, in an age where replication is gradually erasing the notion of the original, may no longer be worth much in itself, but it retains its effectiveness as a means of making visible that which we are unable to imagine by the means of ordinary thought. It is therefore the "work of art" that gradually disappears to appear everywhere, in forms that are sometimes unidentifiable. A gesture, a feeling, a mood... everything is in the affirmation of showing them. Nothing new, you may say, since Fluxus or Robert Filliou and his art "making life more interesting than art". Indeed, except that it is time to stop talking about art at all, to simply show what we want, without characterizing it by any frame claiming to inform on what we imagine to do or be.

Contrary to the current mores which, for the sake of identity, would tend to differentiate everything in order to be better understood, I wish to favour forms of existence that no explanation distinguishes, practices that are as particular as they are variants of the same necessities, identities that only their presence makes real. Art has become a term to say "I" in a world where the frustration of not being able to "be" in the eyes of others is no longer a fact. I, for anyone who simply wants to tell others of their existence on a social network, can be more than enough. There is no need for the notion of art. As for the I that chooses to show, it does not need to define itself.

Beach Neighbours (1 minute away: "The Origin of the Social Model") | Carnac 2014

Summer Body Workshops Agenda for July

The sessions originally scheduled for the 14th and 15th will not take place. 

Saturday, 7th           : Being naked (apprehending one's nudity in public / initiation)


Sunday 8      : A statement in a body (first steps of a performance)


Saturday 14th         : Naked body games (session cancelled)


Saturday 21st        : Nudity and accessories (highlighting the naked body with the stage prop)


Sunday 22nd   : Sexual thinking (acting out the urges)


Saturday 28th       : Exhibition (letting go of her shamelessness)


Sunday 29th  : The opposite movement (knowing how to counteract one's inclination to show something else)

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David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.