round-trip geographies

For a long time, I lived in the suburbs. My first memory is a memory of the suburbs. At the far edges of my memory, a suburban train goes by, as in a film.


Memory and films fill up with objects we will never again be able to grasp. […] Life in the future is already a past, and the present forever tastes of waiting. Boredom is the main agent of erosion in poor landscapes. The castles of childhood recede, adults return to their schoolyard as if it were playtime, then the trains carry them off.

Maurice Pialat, L’amour existe, 1960

I believe that to recognize a home of your own, a land you come from, you need landscapes, images that open up in memory and anchor the body in an environment it feels part of.

I grew up in a residential suburb with asphalt underfoot and no trees, no cafés, no town center.
In urban planning, this geographic zone is described as a "serving territory." Its identity has been siphoned off by the needs of the capital.
Its landscape is scored by major vertical transport axes: the Seine with its barges, the N7 National Road and the South Highway, the train lines. These trenches, laid out for quick round trips, divide residents from one bank to the other, as once only the river held that natural prerogative. They serve to channel resources (food, logistical, human) toward the city that concentrates power.

Along these parallel borders, there are also Orly airport, where a plane takes off every minute and a half, the Rungis market, where provisions arrive from all over the country, and the Ivry incinerator, where all of Paris's waste burns, and which blows two gray plumes of smoke over the old working-class Red Belt, toward the precarious suburbs of the east.
For a long time, I felt no sense of belonging to this place I come from. I was looking to belong elsewhere, and I left. When I came back, I asked myself where home was. Neither Paris nor the dormitory suburb: the landscape I recognized is a suburb-train round trip.

Since I've been working at dancing from this place, my practice begins with a ritual: I walk in circles, along the periphery of a circle. It has become a refuge for my dance, as well as a principle of continuity. Like background noise, the hum of a train in motion.

In my dances of walking in circles, I feel the same as in that train from home that goes nowhere, that loops back on itself, as if to voice the emptiness of its land without land, with no people, no music, no dances.

From the centrifugal force of this perpetual circle, I search for the gestures of an imaginary choreographic idiom, one that would make the interval of the suburban train round trip the place of a reinvented home, a fictional but familiar geography.

so much depends

upon

a harmonica

played in a

stilled train

while drunks are

noisy.

Steve Roden, 365x433

(365 jours x 4:33 min.)