Project Description

This Dancerie: The Paris Project

A collaboration project by Tony Whitfield, Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva, Klaus Fruchtnis, Thierry Micouin, Nils Nusens, Patricio Sarmiento and Andrew Alden

This Dancerie is a multi-event, multi-site, multi-media work that explores the ways in which gay men have created public expressions of desire despite mainstream prohibitions of manifestations of those aspects of their lives in the context of Paris as a complex historical cultural arena for this exploration.

The pretext of This Dancerie is urbanization as a prerequisite for homosexual subculture and the understanding that despite the absence of “gay ghettos, ” gay men developed and carried on forbidden lives in public it cities around the world. This Dancerie focuses on Paris as a cross-road of queer life in which, although, technically, homosexuality was legal since 1791, decency was legislated and under surveillance.

This Dancerie will create a series of foci on Paris as a site of refuge for queer men and the environments they historically frequented. Particular attention will be placed on developing narratives that include a range of differing intersections of class, race, creeds, ethnicities and gender the collaborators will develop a movement based-work for male groupings drawing upon culturally specific traditions. The role immigration plays in these narratives will also be underscored.

This Dancerie is a multi-event, multimedia collaborative work under the artistic direction of Tony Whitfield. This project will be a collaboration between Whitfield, as Executive Producer and Artistic Director, Thierry Micouin as Director of Choreography, media artist Klaus Fruchtnis as Technical Director, fashion designer Patricio Sarmiento, filmmaker Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva and composer/musician Nils Nussen, all from France and composer/ musician Andrew Alden, and filmmakers Joe Lumbroso and Dyana Winkler, from the United States. Eight to ten sites across the City where same sex desire has created a shifting landscape of criminalized activity, class-complicated entanglements, immigrant freedom, forbidden commerce, transgressive beauty and encoded seduction will be the context for short filmed dance/movement based narratives since 1870. Each three to five minute films will begin with a cruising ritual and be filmed in those spaces. For several evenings the films will be presented in situ as projected images activated by passersby movement. Ideally these installations would be debuted as part of Paris’ La Nuit Blanche in 2017.

These films would then be brought together into a single space to produce an additional evening long performance or “dance party” that would be digitally randomized and improvisationally scored for classical ensemble and world pop musicians. Ideally the space would be situated in a cultural center and include a live performance component that involved local gay residents. Various forms of social media will be employed to augment and reveal aspects of the project's narrative content during the culminating dance party and its scatter site installations.

Several aspects of this project should move it beyond the context of performance based works that explore cultural identity and history. They include: the site specific nature of the public installation that will seek to revive unknown queer histories in ways that immerse the audience in the projected work; the creation of apps that will allow the participant to access deeper know of the history behind the narrative they have stumbled into as well as information about the artwork itself and other components of the work at other sites across Paris as well as multifaceted entries into the "dance party."

It is anticipated that audiences for This Dancerie will include: post modern dance, experimental music, expanded cinema, public art and contemporary performing arts audiences. In addition general public members who are attending events associated with Paris' La Nuit Blanche 2017 and local commmunities adjacent to the various sites in which This Danceries' short constituent works will be situated.This project will seek to engage LGBTQI populations including scholars, artists, performers and youth. Social media, print and electronic media associated with La Nuit Blanche and the venue that will host the culminating event will be drawn upon in addition to apps established specifically for This Dancerie.

The primary goal is to reveal the queer past and present of Paris as an urban geography that has been multifaceted, ethnically, economically, and culturally diverse while also revealing those aspects of queer life that defy normalization, concealment behind closed doors challenge notions of "decency" are tied to desire and find expression despite histories of policing and surveillance. In addition this work will seek to engage collaborative, improvisational and interactive structures and technologies to create social points of entry and discussion among various queer communities across Paris and beyond as a means of expanding current discussions about same sex desire.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Magic City Ballroom

Magic City: My Parisian Neighbourhood a Century Ago

BY ADMIN / SUNDAY, 10 MARCH 2013 / PUBLISHED IN UNCATEGORIZED

My Parisian friends frequently tell me that my neighbourhood in the stuffy 7th arrondissement is, well, boring.

It’s an observation that, at first blush, is difficult to dispute. I once read the 7th arrondissement described as “Poodleland” – a bourgeois enclave where rich ladies walk their little dogs along wide prosperous avenues. True, Poodleland is quiet, self-assured, and inward looking. Old aristocratic habits – and bylaws — keep trade to a strict minimum. There are no cinemas, no retail chains, no food concourses, no McDonald’s, no public swimming pools, and no sports gyms. When a Starbucks showed up in the rue Saint-Dominique some time ago, there was a mild flutter of incomprehension throughout the neighbourhood.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Poodleland was once the centre of bohemian nightlife in Paris. It even had a name: Magic City.

Magic City was an American-style amusement park built in 1900 as part of the Exposition Universelle that year. While the Paris world fair stretched all the way from the Eiffel Tower to the Invalides, Magic City was a “parc d’attraction” constructed at the base of the Alma bridge crossing the Seine. That bridge is today known mainly for its tragic connection with Princess Diana’s death. A century ago, it was famous for Magic City, which local historians tell us stretched from 67 to 91 Quai d’Orsay along the Seine. I live on Quai d’Orsay and my building is within that range of addresses. Magic City was just outside my front door.

Built by Ernest Cognacq, the rich owner of the Samarataine department store, Magic City featured all the usual theme park attractions — everything from roller coasters and water slides to more novel curiosities in 1900 such as moving sidewalks and a mini railway. Another attraction was more morally questionable but typical of the era circa 1900: a sort of human zoo showing African natives – called “headhunters” – who were put on display like caged animals for the curiosity of bourgeois Parisians.

Fortunately we have photos of most of these attractions thanks to the Belle Epoque postcards of Magic City that survive (seehere for postcard images, also here for a photo diaporama). The unique feature of amusement parks during that period is that they were mainly for adults. The “family” amusement park for children would come later.

The most popular attraction was the Magic City ballroom where Parisians came to dance to orchestra music. By the “Années Folles” in the 1920s, the Magic City ballroom had become popular with the Parisian gay scene. Particularly notorious were the Magic City “drag balls” held on Mardi Gras. The photographer Brassai took many photographs of these transvestite soirées, called “Bals des Invertis” (see photo below and other photos here).

Today Magic City, shut down by French authorities in 1934, has largely passed into oblivion. My neighbours in Poodleland have never heard of it, even though they live right on the Magic City location. Most of the area was razed and rebuilt, which explains why so many buildings in my neighbourhood — including mine — are Art Deco style constructed in the 1930s.

Magic City had a curious epilogue however. When the Germans occupied Paris during the Second World War they requisitioned the old Magic City ballroom. After the war France’s state-owned television network – the equivalent of the BBC – moved into the same building and used the old ballroom stage as a TV studio. For decades, the French public television network was operating out of the old Magic City dance hall that had been a gay nightclub during the Roaring Twenties.

Today France’s public TV networks have moved elsewhere, but the old Magic City studios are still standing, home to a few small TV channels on the digital service. Fittingly, the address is rue Cognacq-Jay, named after the same rich Parisian who built Magic City in 1900.

I walk Oscar up and down rue Cognacq-Jay every day. It’s just around the corner – the last vestige of the extravagant Magic City amusement park that today is mostly forgotten.