NONSENSE AND OTHER MATTERS - 2023

It's truly remarkable how, at times, the depth and complexity of human experiences can be so overwhelming that an individual is compelled to fully engage with the situation at hand.

The environment undeniably influences the performer, evident in their response to the circumstances. Instead of an individual portraying a character, it feels as though the character is revealing itself through its own essence and the action of navigating the situation. This dynamic interplay between the performer and the environment forms a unique dance, blurring the lines between reality and portrayal, culminating in moments of genuine authenticity and raw emotion.

This raw emotion parallels the philosophical notion of affect, an immediate response not yet molded by cultural, social, or personal narratives.. The concept of “affect” denotes a pre-personal intensity that exists outside of conscious awareness. This force or intensity, while palpable, often eludes articulation or full comprehension. It represents not just an emotion or feeling but the potential for those feelings. When I discuss "raw emotion," I allude to an unfiltered, genuine response to a situation or stimulus.

In the realm of performance, when an artist is deeply engaged with their environment, responding genuinely and without artifice, we witness a manifestation of affect. This moment transcends mere acting based on learned behaviors or scripts, delving into a deeper, primal force.

The relationship between a performer, pure affect, and the act of performing is intricate. Some posit that a performer can access a state of pure affect or raw emotion, especially evident when they become so immersed in their role that they momentarily transcend their own identity. Yet, others contend that the act of performing, especially in the presence of an audience, introduces a level of self-awareness that hinders unmediated affect. Even in genuine moments, the performer remains cognizant of the audience and context, influencing their actions and emotions. When a performer embodies a character, a melding occurs between the character's narrative and the performer's experiences. Thus, even if an emotion feels "raw," it's filtered through the character's lens. The audience's perception also plays a pivotal role, with some viewing a performance as genuine and others as rehearsed. This fluidity of affect, its ever-changing nature, makes it a rich area of exploration.

The journey from raw affect to the performance of scripted emotion is multifaceted, involving mediation, interpretation, and representation. Affect, in its purest form, is an immediate response to stimuli, untouched by narratives. As this intensity interacts with personal experiences and cultural contexts, it morphs into recognizable emotion. Artists, in preparation for a performance, strive to encapsulate these emotions in a scripted form, translating human emotion into replicable actions. The audience, in turn, interprets this performance based on their experiences, either resonating with the emotion or viewing it as mere performance.

This entire process, from raw affect to performance, is a dynamic interplay of emotions, oscillating between authenticity and representation. It underscores the complexities of human emotion and the artistry involved in its portrayal.

IN TIME - 2022

This project is a dance. It is a choreographic reflection on the subjective rules that govern dancing and an attempt (in finding their sub-versions) at their subversions (sub-versions).

We live in times when world events demand quick radical shifts of perception. These shifts can come with a dramatic sense of loss. They can challenge us to question what we know as they already are. With or without our explicit knowledge, it may require us to re-form other conceptions of being.

I attempt to engage in a similar process with choreography. To create a physical event (a dance) that demands a shift of perception and observe if and how it reforms other conceptions of being; being in movement with dance.

While a shift of perception is an excellent opportunity for change, it can be perceived as a loss. Consequently, the dominant tendency is to enforce new (subjective) rules (of being) to compensate for that loss. Rules that directly (re)validate the recognition of a pre-existing (subjective) system of standards, or what I name an individual subjective classical framework—a set of historical customs essential to signify how an individual must situate themself in relation to the forces of an event. From there on, a process takes place that "naturalizes" these relations and our place within them.

It is that very process that I want to undertake.

Alain Baidou says that what is historically fundamental to that process is negation. For example, 'revolt against...', 'opposition to...', 'negation of ...' is essential, like in politics and artistic creation. He believes we live in a sort of crisis of trust in the power of negation.

The predicament of negation is that it rarely allows change. It excludes what comes as other. It tends to find fixity when an event demands movement. It strives to conserve and acquire a dominant status as the only truth. What is left is a hegemonic replacement by negation.

I want to transform a subjective classical framework where affirmation comes before negation. I want to start with the positive proposition that something can change. To be clear, I am not suggesting abolishing negation; revolt, opposition, and negation are certainly essential; hence the critique of forms of artistic creation. Instead, I want to include what comes as other first and observe how it subverts a pre-existing subjective order.

I aim to create a body that moves beyond the confound of its subjective classical framework. A body that changes and subverts its subjective rules while dancing. A body without its prediction. A body that affirms that change is possible and witness it as it happens. A body that affirms and includes before it negates and excludes.

Cyril Baldy

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE - 2019

Considering that a collective of dancers dancing together resemble a micro model of a society organised by economies of movement, attention and decision making to a world (their world), I like to provoke the way people perceive an individual, a community and the world around them.

Part of my work focused on the social practice of movement, investigating the individual as part of the collective. I try to introduce in my choreographies the notion of a universal conscience that suspends dancing outside its normal confines and challenges the way we inhabit the world, the way we embody “being in the world”, the way we embody our human physical experience by expanding our sense of self in connection with the others around us.

Acknowledging and paying attention to how “I”, “them”, “us”, “he”, “she”, and “they” physically organise in relation is one of the basis of my work.

Choreography, in this way, derives from the sincere practice in which each person collaborates with one another in various ways to create a divers field of action, and propose critical interventions within existing socio-choregaphic systems in an effort that is designed to inspire debate and other perceptions or carry out change.

Cyril Baldy

HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD - 2018

So, I return after all that to my original to my original subject: How to change the world?

My answer is, by becoming a subjective part of the consequences of a local event. At the different level.

To fall in love can be change the world, but it is precisely to become a subjective part of the consequences of a local event.

By creation of an equivalence between freedom and discipline. Not an opposition, but a point where to be obstinate to do something is the same thing as freedom. And, the invention, by the invention of a new form of happiness which is a victory against the potency of death, that is the potency and the patience to stay in your place. We know that something is changing in the world when we experiment that happiness is not the pre-determinant goal of the movement itself but the inventive subjectivisation of the movement itself. So you see, the change is not to achieve a result, the result lays inside the change itself. In the form of the new subject.

So maybe we can say here, happiness is not general possibility of satisfaction, happiness is not the abstract idea of a society where everybody is satisfied, happiness is a subjectivity of a difficult task, to organise the consequences of some event, and to discover under the sad existence of the world the brilliant possibilities of the hidden real of the world.

Finally we can say, to enjoy finally, the powerful creative existence of what was from the point of view of the world impossible. The powerful existence of the impossible as such. And to discover the possibility of this impossibility.

So,… how to change the world? The answer is a nice one. By being happy. Not by the result of the change, but by the change itself. But we must pay the price, the price is to be sometimes unsatisfied. its a choice, a true choice, between happiness and satisfaction. And it is the choice of what we can name the true life.

Maybe the world of today has many defaults […]  it propose a false life, the seeming of a life. So, to d the choice of happiness over satisfaction under local experiences, artistic creations, political inventions and so on, and be in the new freedom as discipline is choice against satisfaction to some extend. So we are exposed to the possibility to be sometimes unsatisfied in the name of happiness. It’s the price, it’s the price.

Alain Badiou - Edited transcript by Cyril Baldy

KNOWLEDGE - 2017

Knowledge is the common agreement of what is repeatable and transmittable.
Practice dancing to invert this logic.
Dance entails dancing through the world while affirming “It can certainly totally could also be that”.
Do this before definitely totally indefatigably saying “No way ever, no no, that cannot be, uh uh, can’t be”.
Use knowledge to do so. (Mine, Yours, Everyones) Keep repeating and transmitting and repeating and transmitting as infinitum (see what happens)

Cyril Baldy

STATEMENT - 2016

The lifelong endeavor is to keep on dancing. This venture immediately raises the following question: How to keep on dancing? My answer would be: To keep on dancing while suspending fixity of codification in dance, its practice, its choreography and its performance. Resisting and re-forming their previous definitions to allow change (or something other to happen).

To do so, a framework must be proposed in which change is a possibility. Change not as a result but as a procedure. The procedure of verification of change itself and its consequences.

The overall construction of this framework is a physical practice for dance, choreography and performance that is neither concerned with the composition of form in time and space nor using dance to illustrate an idea or a concept, but instead concerned with the relations that weave between movements as the source of material for this dance.

Theses in-betweens, or relations, are composite of what I call raw materials. These raw materials are what constitute the body, the stuff it is made of, its physicality, its effects and affects before there forms of appearance are determined, before the premise of their discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is worthy is fixed.

Raw materials are commonly understood as deviations from the norms. They have been rendered unimportant relative to a particular conceptualization of dance. From a broader perspective, what is render unimportant in one framework of knowledge, may turn out to be the departing point of a developing new/ other frameworks of knowledge.

How to get out of the way of our own dancing through these in-betweens. How will we ourselves be the medium for these raw materials for a dance to appear, rather than having dance to be a medium for ourselves to appear. Taking the idea of a medium one step further, how will we work on the invisible things that these dancing raw materials make visible.

Cyril Baldy