Interview by Wilson Le Personnic
Published on March 10, 2023 in MA CULTURE

At the crossroads of mediums, Guillaume Marie sees creation as a zone where dance, philosophy, performance, somatic techniques and alternative cultures come together. Taking the form of a choreographic concert for two dancers and a musician, his latest creation SNOW CLOUD is the second part of a diptych on consolation. Paying homage to theater as a heterotopia for channeling our pain and sorrow, the choreographer draws on the ancient rituals of professional mourners to imagine new representations of consolation through a cathartic recital. In this interview, Guillaume Marie shares the nuts and bolts of his artistic research and looks back at the creative process behind SNOW CLOUD.

You’ve been developing your own work for over fifteen years. Could you talk a little more about the various themes that run through your artistic research today?

Above all, I like to create environments where different themes, people and media can meet, live and think together over the duration of a project. I like to create these zones where thought can take shape in the very special time of creation. I wouldn’t be able to create alone. I love group energy, different points of view, fusions and frictions, and all the tools that theater puts at our disposal. These often troubled zones are inspired by dance, philosophy, performance, somatic techniques and alternative cultures. They offer us the chance to form a group and gradually map out our relationship with the world together. When a project comes to an end, a new question emerges and offers a new angle to my reflections. What I’ve (un)built shakes, and I dive back in to invent a new language and try to answer it. Each creation generates its own ecosystem, even if certain motifs run through them all. The body and theater are marvelous mediums for articulating the poetic with the political, nothing new here, but it’s a field that inspires me and that I never stop digging into and taming.

SNOW CLOUD is part of a diptych on consolation initiated in 2019 with the piece ROGER. Could you go back over the history of this diptych and the genesis of this new piece?

I had just finished a project on apocalyptic time, featuring a group lost in the ruins of our present. The idea was not to think of the apocalypse as a sudden event that would fracture our time, but rather to consider that we’re already in the middle of it: we’re facing a succession of crises (environmental, economic, societal…) without any paradigm shifts, without our having moved into the time after. From there, I asked myself how we could reflect on this aftermath, and I came to the conclusion that before we could conceptualize utopias, we’d first have to learn to console ourselves for what we’ve lost, while asking ourselves how the space of the theater could lend itself to this. It was this last point that really got me going. I quickly realized that the places dedicated to the practice of consolation in our societies didn’t suit me, and that it seemed important to bring it back into a space that was far removed from any religious or psychological instances, because that’s still not the case. Consolation is as much about intimacy as it is about the public. I wanted to pay tribute to theater as a heterotopia for channeling our pain and sorrow. La consolation conjures up different figures. With ROGER, I focused on the figure of the inconsolable. Then with SNOW CLOUD, that of the inconsolable.

SNOW CLOUD is a choreographic concert for two dancers and a musician. Music has always played a central role in your work. How does the musical medium come into play in your choreographic research?

Music has always played a fundamental role in my work, because it’s the medium to which I’m most sensitive. I love experimental electronic music and its materiality, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet some incredible musicians and immerse myself intuitively in this culture. I worked a lot with KK Null, who is one of the great pioneers of the Japanese de scene (the name given to the Japanese noise music scene, which was particularly prolific and influential in the 1980s and 1990s). His music is extremely powerful, violent and dense. It is singular and requires no accompaniment. I saw it as a challenge: how do you tame this music? How do you survive when it’s destroying everything in its path? To get into the pieces we’ve made together, you have to accept that the music dominates everything, is almost painful, let go and trust us. It’s a wall that I place between the audience and the piece. But it’s a fragile wall, with gaps, back doors, secret passages to create harmonies with the actions on stage. While the sound space seems saturated, there are still ways through which it can be traversed. It’s a turbulent journey, but one that holds out the hope that we, spectators and performers, caught together in the materiality of sound, will have physically moved by the end of the show. It hasn’t always worked, but I’ve tried to share the experiences I’ve had in concert. For ROGER, I decided to play a wall of sound by KK Null for the audience entrance, to open the ears, then dive in and explore a silence whose quality is then multiplied. In 2019, I created a performance for the Atonal Berlin festival. This festival, which I attend regularly, is a meeting point for fans of experimental music. The quality of listening is incredible, highly ritualized, in the sumptuous setting of a huge disused factory. It was there that I met Aho Ssan. I was looking to choreograph a concert of mourners and electronic music, and our meeting was decisive in setting up this project. Her music is physical but also melodic, soft, dark and cinematic. It matched the aesthetic I was looking for. I also wanted Aho Ssan to be on the set and play the music live. We worked with the dancers and Aho Ssan to write a vocal and musical score together. Here, the choreography nestles in the action of crying, and the sobs become musical instruments.

ROGER and SNOW CLOUD was an opportunity for you to reflect on the representation of affects on stage and to use them as choreographic raw material. How did you approach this imaginary world choreographically?

SNOW CLOUD was already in gestation when I created ROGER. The figure of the inconsolable inspires me, because I feel in this refusal of all consolation a strength, a poetic and political energy that I wanted to highlight. But how to choreograph this disruptive force? Simulacra emerged as a strategy for stepping back and peacefully experiencing this state. I knew I wanted to concentrate on the action of crying, avoiding any narrative arc so that it would be possible for everyone to project their own pain, and for the performers to offer the possibility of taking charge of this grief, absorbing and embodying it in a “crying machine” device. I realized that this action of crying for others already existed in our societies: professional mourners were invited to funerals to express emotions that we can’t always show. So we invented our own practice to train ourselves to cry. I also wanted to find physiological ways of working on this state and freeing ourselves from any psychological action. The idea was to avoid this creation becoming group therapy! Finally, from a dramaturgical point of view, it seemed essential to me that “life should prevail over death”, so I worked on a cathartic ritual aimed at transcendence, a liberation through tears.

Could you tell us more about the creative process with your collaborators?

Everyone was able to program their own week and invite other participants. We all became performers, playwrights, choreographers, musicians and light designers. We worked on the Ilan Lev somatic method, learned how to hang and program projectors, organized readings, improvised fictions, played with strings and made associations. And we cried together, deconstructed the action and made an inventory of it. The role of Suet Wan Tsang, an Ilan Lev method therapist and dancer in the piece, was decisive in engaging us in choreographic material. This shaking body technique requires a state of self-hypnosis that leads to trance. We then sculpted this material, clarifying our intentions and writing out our itineraries. All these experiences nourished us. Then, in a more traditional production phase, we began writing this choreographic concert. In the context of covid, working between Berlin and Paris brought its share of complications, but this practice of crying daily really increased our resilience to the world and enabled us to move forward, to be flexible and creative in reaching our goal.

SNOW CLOUD is a performance at the intersection of movement, voice, electronic music and technology. How did this hybrid format come about? How did you imagine and conceptualize this somatic experience?

I quickly realized that it would be impossible for us to witness the tears and sobs of the performers without a set-up that allowed the audience to join in, gave clear codes and provided the necessary distance to appreciate the experience we were offering. Suet Wan Tsang and Maria Stamenkovic Herranz start the piece by crying, and put their hearts on the table with incredible generosity. But, as in life, crying can trigger empathy or repulsion. I wanted to resolve this dilemma. The concert form allowed me to do just that. Of course, we break away from it when it’s relevant to the piece, to open up other spaces. But we always come back to it. Once the set list has started, it never stops. SNOW CLOUD is constructed like a ritualized recital whose aim is to bring about a form of catharsis. The work of Marcel Weber, Berlin-based artist and creator of numerous audiovisual concerts, reinforces this device and creates the balance between the vulnerability of the performers’ somatic and vocal qualities and the spectacular, sensual aesthetic we were looking for to signify the concert form.