Gisèle Vienne - CROWD

Up until The Pyre (2013), my pièces, regardless of the number of performers, have largely been about private space and superimposed intimacies through persons who are often rather isolated. With CROWD, after The Ventriloquists Convention (2015), it’s the second time that I’m depicting a group whose social activity and interactions play a central role. This group is certainly very different from that of the ventriloquists’ convention, since it’s a group of young people who have come together out of a desire for feelings of euphoria and out of a common interest in a musical genre, techno. The context chosen is that of a party. The staging of the group fits in nicely with the question of intimacy and its relation to the group, and the relationship between individual and collective emotions.

In CROWD, there are often exhilarating aspects and outlets of expression of intensified emotions that develop through desire and the complex longing for love. The persons who go to this party, and thus form a community, are prepared to experience particularly intense emotions of any kind, and reach a state where their senses are already very much heightened. The group becomes excited by a pièce where the structure and certain behaviors evoke various rituals. In the face of this emotional rollercoaster, the audience can likewise enter into a physical and emotional rapport with the pièce.

In CROWD, the fifteen dancers constitute individual personae whose psychologies, imaginations, feelings, and histories are in each case very different. When you’re observing a party, there’s a huge number of “stories” that are unfolding right before your eyes; in CROWD, there are histories and portraits of persons that the author of the text Dennis Cooper has developed based on work done with the actors, which refines and influences the creation of the pièce. This aspect of the pièce brings to mind the process of mixing in music. It involves a mixing of narrations, as though you have fifteen different music tracks and you’re adjusting their respective volume levels, and thus a composition that allows the audience to have a key role in the way in which they will see and experience the pièce.