On Thursday August 29, SUZANNE had the immense pleasure of premiering her piece TO LIFE at La Mégisserie in Saint-Junien as part of the CHAMP LIBRE Festival : a great way to kick off the new 2024-2025 season.
In residence at the Centre national de la Danse (CN D de Pantin), SUZANNE opened the door of her studio on November 17, 2024 to present a work in progress on her next piece, TO LIFE, a dance piece for 7 performers.
“À voir et à danser” (a blog dedicated to the dance), which has been following the work of TO LIFE since its creation, took the opportunity to write a chronicle/portfolio on this work in progress, which is due to premiere in August 2024.
“Une gestuelle se dessine et s’affine qui n’en évacue pas pour autant la polysémie possible du geste. Des regards plus appuyés, derrière soi, ou dans des diagonales hautes et basses dessinent un espace plus vaste que celui d’un simple couloir de marche. Celui d’un monde qu’on abandonne et un autre en devenir ?”
https://avoiretadanser.fr/to-life-suzanne/
Last Friday 13th and Saturday 14th January, SUZANNE had the great pleasure of performing a 20 minutes “workstep” of its future piece TO LIFE, for the “shared stage” OPEN SPACE #1 at the Etoile du nord theater in Paris. It has been an occasion for SUZANNE to try the very beginnings of its brand new creation before a fully booked auditorium and to gather the first thoughts impressions.
It is the author of the dance dedicated blog “A voir et à danser” (To see and to dance) that first released a very nicely written article displaying also photographs from the performance.
« En l’espace d’une vingtaine de minutes, par touches successives, les contours d’un monde futuriste, voire peut-être même post-apocalyptique, semble se dessiner. Une humanité marche vers son destin dont on ne sait encore, à ce stade de la création, ce qu’il en adviendra. Suzanne fait de la marche la métaphore d’un acte de résistance au sein de laquelle semblent pouvoir se reconstituer des formes de solidarités. »
https://blog.avoiretadanser.fr/2023/01/to-life-de-suzanne-au-festival-open.html
On September 21, during the 9th edition of AICA France Prize for Art Critics, SUZANNE was presented by the independent curator Léo Marin. An oral presentation inspired by the PechaKucha principle : 20 images each commented for 20 seconds for a total duration of 6 minutes 40 seconds. A performative format that applies to art criticism that offers the possibility for a large audience artists and works that have not yet receive the attention they deserve.
Léo Marin takes the gamble of presenting a group of performers, dancers, a multiple body in an exercice where artist generally choose one artist or sometimes a group of artists and artworks. It is also an opportunity for him to establish its own collaboration with SUZANNE over time while integrating it into the continuity of his favorite research subject: insularity.
Under the direction of Sylvia Varagne, the first edition of L’Appel du Large festival offered to thirty artists, including SUZANNE, new meeting spaces between the seafront, boards, Pompeian baths and public spaces.
It was also (the immense) chance, after a post-containment 2.0 period, to reinvest the public space and once again offer curious passers-by and a few tourists STATU, the company’s first creation, which does not had not been performed since June 2019 in Vilnius as part of the Vilnius Art Fair. In a context of a global pandemic which has limited the distribution and exchange opportunities for artists, meetings between the public and artists and artists were the sinews of war for this first edition of L’ Appel du Large.
Despite an edition marked by the pandemic and the closure before midnight of large numbers of museums, institutions and associated sites, SUZANNE has succeeded in showing to the parisian audience an unprecedented creation combining monumental installation, live video projection, minimalist movements and polyphonic singing. “CANON“, presented in la Cour d’Honneur of the Musée des Archives Nationales during the Nuit Blanche, attracted the attention of the magazine “Toute La Culture” and came out in the heart of Eliaz Ait Seddick.
On the occasion of the 13th edition of festival JERK OFF at Point Ephémère, Samuel Belfond and Anne-Charlotte Michaut from MANIFESTO.XXI came to meet SUZANNE on September 10th at the end of “MERCURES‘s” dress rehearsal. They exchanged around the notion of “error” in choreographic creation and how it interferes as a common thread in the development of a new language that SUZANNE tries to introduce to a triptych which includes “STATU” (2018), “MERCURES” (2019) and “CANON” (2020).
It is in the midst of an absolutely new context (the Covid19 pandemic) that SUZANNE has been immensely lucky to receive the invitation from Bruno Peguy (the artistic director from the JERK OFF festival) to present “MERCURES” during the last edition of JERK OFF festival at Le Point Éphémère in Paris. Two performances during the same evening of Friday 11th September at 7p.m and 9.30pm. Thomas Adam-Garnung, editor in chief of Ballroom Online magazine, was in the audience to watch the show first and then meet SUZANNE.
It’s in her relationship to mistake and chance that the staging video of her performance “STATU” responded to the theme “RESET” and as a result SUZANNE is part of the very latest edition of Art Souterrain festival. Presented continuously throughout the festival, the video triggers many reactions. Charlotte Dibon from Esse arts + opinions magazine has given SUZANNE its first paper in the Canadian press specializing in contemporary art and multidisciplinary practices since 1984 !
Neringa Bumbliene, curator, working especially for the CAC Vilnius, returns in words and images on the 10th edition of Art Vilnius. To celebrate the decade of this contemporary art fair, Aurélie Faure, curator, benefits from an invitation and program the exhibition ‘Focus France” where we find SUZANNE presenting for the first time, out of France and the parisian artistic scene her two creations “STATU” and “MERCURES“.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz0iiz4IyBS/
“@artvilnius is the biggest art fair in the Northeast Europe, taking place in the capital of Lithuania. It was established in 2009 as part of the Vilnius European capital of culture and is taking place since then. 30 May-2 June this year the fair was celebrating its tenth-year-anniversary with a #FocusFrance programme. Curated by Aurélie Faure (@katarinastella), it brought 11 French galleries, with rare exceptions mostly Parisian ones, presented the French group exhibition On the Edge, and a few performances by French artists and artists collectives, such as a group titled by a female name SUZANNE, scheduled at different times and locations throughout the duration of the fair.”
Text by Neringa Bumblienė for Elaine Alain