Why, on New Year’s Eve, do we dance more to Mia Frye’s Macarena than to Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A?
Dancer Anna Chirescu, visual artist Grégoire Schaller and actor Florian Pautasso perform in a basement that appears to have been converted into a gym by gymnastics enthusiasts. In the center, a tatami circumscribes their performance space, literally devoted to performance. But what kind of movement would be considered virtuoso in a gym that doesn’t seem to be dedicated to any particular discipline? In the form of a training session, the piece questions the relationship of these three dirty dancers to perfection, the spectacular, risk and icons. Two figures polarize this research into representation: Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966), in which the embodiment of everyday gesture becomes dance, and Nadia Comaneci’s spectacular feat at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, to which the judges, for the first time in the history of the Games, awarded a perfect score of 10.